University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
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Theses and Dissertations
8-2012
The Journey Narrative: The Trope of Women's
Mobility and Travel in Contemporary Arab
Women's Literary Narratives
Banan Al-Daraiseh
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
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Narratives" (2012). Theses and Dissertations. Paper 522.
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THE JOURNEY NARRATIVE: THE TROPE OF WOMEN‘S MOBILITY AND TRAVEL IN
CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN‘S LITERARY NARRATIVES
THE JOURNEY NARRATIVE: THE TROPE OF WOMEN‘S MOBILITY AND TRAVEL IN
CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN‘S LITERARY NARRATIVES
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
By
Banan Al-Daraiseh
Mu‘tah University
Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, 2003
University of Arkansas
Master of Arts in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, 2007
August 2012
University of Arkansas
ABSTRACT
This study examines the trope of women‘s journey and the various kinds of movement
and travel it includes employed and represented by three contemporary Arab women literary
writers, Ghada Samman, Ahdaf Soueif, and Leila Aboulela in their literary narratives as well as
travelogue in the case of Samman. The primary texts analyzed in this study are Samman‘s Beirut
75 and The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase, Soueif‘s In the Eye of the Sun, and Aboulela‘s The
Translator and Minaret. These texts demonstrate how the journey trope becomes a fresh
narrative strategy used by Arab women writers that allows the representation of the instability,
unpredictability, and heterogeneity of Arab women‘s identities. The multiple subjectivities the
female persona/protagonists occupy become possible due to their mobility and movement,
crossing the borders of time and space and occupying a fluid place of their own theoretical and
imaginative construction. In these texts, travel creates a geographic in-between space for these
women that allows them to contest essentialized views of their identities and narrate their own
individual, hybrid, cross-cultural, and transnational identities that continually undergo
transformation and change. I argue that the mobility, travel experiences, journeys, and physical
displacement the persona/protagonists go through serve as tropes of female agency: movement
allows them to map personal geographies and exist in a liminal space of their own construction,
where they counter fixed Western Orientalist, Neo-Orientalist, and traditional patriarchal
discourses that presented them at different historical moments as speechless, subaltern, and
stripped of their agency. As a result, the journey trope serves both as a way to examining the
varied representations of Arab woman subjectivities in addition to destabilizing fixed notions of
gendered, cultural, and religious identity formations.
This dissertation is approved for recommendation
to the Graduate Council.
Dissertation Director:
____________________________________________
Dr. Mohja Kahf
Dissertation Committee:
________________________________________
Dr. Joel Gordon
________________________________________
Dr. Susan Marren
DISSERTATION DUPLICATION RELEASE
I hereby authorize the University of Arkansas Libraries to duplicate this dissertation when
needed for research and/or scholarship.
Agreed_________________________________________
Banan Al-Daraiseh
Refused_________________________________________
Banan Al-Daraiseh
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to my dissertation advisor and the chair of the
committee, Professor Mohja Kahf, for her valuable supervision and guidance during the writing
of this dissertation and during my journey through graduate school. I am also indebted to her for
mentoring and training me to become a successful teacher of literature. I would also like to thank
the other members of the committee, Professor Susan Marren and Professor Joel Gordon, for
their faith in this work and their constructive suggestions and feedback. I am particularly grateful
to Professor Gordon whose guidance, encouragement and enthusiasm enabled me to finally
submit my dissertation. I have learned immensely from the conversations I had with him. Many
thanks go to my colleagues and friends at the English Department for their genuine
encouragement throughout the process. I would also like to thank my dear roommate and sister
Isra, who provided me with much needed support throughout my last two years in graduate
school.
I am indebted to the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies, the Comparative
Literature program, and the English Department at the University of Arkansas for providing me
with the opportunity to pursue my graduate studies. I would also like to thank all faculty
members and staff affiliated to these programs because without them, I wouldn‘t have succeeded
in graduate school.
I am deeply indebted to my family, my mother, my father, my siblings, Nidal, Sawsan,
Suzan, Amani, Muhammad, Isra, and Majd, and my nephews and nieces, Muhammad Sh,
Muhamad Z, Leen, Ahmad, and Wasan, whose patience, love and prayers kept me going. I
would like to particularly thank my niece, Raneem, for her sense of humor when constantly
reminding me in standard Arabic that writing a risallah (risallah means dissertation in spoken
Arabic but means letter in Standard Arabic) takes less than an hour! Last but not least, I am
grateful to my dear fiancé, Firas, for always listening to me and being there for me while writing
the dissertation despite the distance that separates us—and, of course, for calling me and waking
me up early in the morning to write every time my alarm failed!
DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to my dear parents, Fathieh Zo‘ubi and Ahmad Daraiseh,
whose unconditional love and support made me believe in myself. Mom and Dad, this is for you!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CONCLUSION
NOTES
REFERENCES
1
40
98
131
190
196
199
Introduction
This study examines the trope of women‘s journey and the various kinds of movement
and travel it includes employed and represented by three contemporary Arab women literary
writers, Ghada Samman, Ahdaf Soueif, and Leila Aboulela in their literary narratives as well as
travelogue, in the case of Samman. The heterogeneous and multiple subjectivities the female
persona/protagonists occupy become possible due to their mobility and movement, crossing the
borders of time and space and occupying a fluid place of their own theoretical and imaginative
construction. The trope of journey allows the representation of the women, their subjectivities,
and the texts as dynamic literary products circulating across dynamic and unfixed cultural and
geographic borderlines. In addition, mobility allows these protagonists to defy any attempt to be
defined solely by a certain geographic location, discourse, ideology, or literary tradition.
Movement and journey in the selected texts and in the lives of these women protagonists and/or
author provides a means to representing these unpredictable, unfixed, and hybrid subjectivities.
This dissertation underscores how the trope of journey becomes a fresh narrative strategy used
by Arab women writers that allows the representation of the instability and unpredictability of
identity. The aim of using journey as a narrative strategy is to destabilize the construction of
identity and move away from fixed assumptions and stereotypical representations of Arab
women. As a result, the journey trope serves both as a way of examining the varied
representations of Arab woman subjectivities and of destabilizing fixed notions of gendered,
cultural, and religious identity formations. This dissertation focuses on analyzing the
representation of the shifting subjectivities of Arab women and their interaction with the cultural,
geographic, and religious dynamics that contribute to the unpredictable and dynamic
representation of these subjectivities. The primary texts analyzed in this study are Samman‘s
1
Beirut 75 and The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase, Soueif‘s In the Eye of the Sun, and Aboulela‘s
The Translator and Minaret.
This dissertation addresses the way these literary representations of the trope of journey
demonstrate how travel creates a geographic in-between space for the protagonists that allows
them to contest essentialized views of their identities and narrate their own individual, hybrid,
cross-cultural, and transnational identities that continually undergo transformation and change. I
argue that the mobility, travel experiences, journeys, and physical displacement the
author/protagonists go through serve as tropes of female agency: movement allows them to map
personal geographies and exist in a liminal space of their own construction that in turn enables
them to create individual narratives that counter fixed Western Orientalist, Neo-Orientalist, and
traditional local patriarchal discourses that present them at different historical moments as
speechless, subaltern, subservient, and stripped of their agency.
The awareness of the essentializing representation of the image of the Arab woman in
literary and cultural discourses has been the motivation pushing me to show how these authors
challenge, through their literary representations, both patriarchal authority in their own cultures
and Western hegemonic discourses that essentialize Arab women‘s experiences. Such discourses
tend to represent Arab women‘s lives at different periods in history as intrinsically private and
homogeneously speechless. In the texts I analyze, the protagonists often travel alone, as did the
authors, and their experiences remain individual and personal, mapping personal geographies
where they negotiate their identities among various cultural spaces, places, across borders and
identity narratives. Through travel, these protagonists affirm female agency as well as a dynamic
disjunctive hybridity that engages the complexities and paradoxes of identity formation upon
culture-crossing and moving between national, international, and transnational borders. Because
2
these authors use travel and journey as a condition to build up their narratives while negotiating
different dominant discourses on the Arab woman, mobility and movement become the major
components to shaping their responses to varied forms of gendered power structures, imbalanced
social order, and misrepresentation and appropriation of their identities. Through travel and
journey, these women protagonists go beyond subverting the dominant expectations and
discourses about them in the places they settle, to constructing and inscribing a balanced
alternative about Arab women‘s agency. Thus, to read the trope of journey in Arab women‘s
literary narratives as the site of challenge, deconstruction, transformation, and reconstruction of
experience and subjectivity illuminates new ways of understanding Arab female agency. Most
importantly, the employment of tropes of movement and travel as narrative strategy by these
authors deconstructs the traditional dichotomy of male mobility and female stability. Because
travel and movement facilitate the emergence of multiple subjectivities among Arab women, it
becomes important to analyze this trope in literature written by and about Arab women.
This dissertation closely analyzes and defines the strategies Ghada Samman, Ahdaf
Soueif, and Leila Aboulela employ when representing the trope of women‘s journey and
mobility in the selected narratives. Specifically, I argue that these writers present mobility and
travel in three different modes that engage the time periods, the geographies, and the sociohistorical realities they have experienced.
Ghada Samman employs the trope of departure, escape, and quest as a means to
challenging socio-economic ideologies that govern the spatial movement of Arab women.
Samman, who was considered part of a generation of woman writers who addressed feminist
issues in the novel in addition to the way the socio-economics of their relaities determines
women‘s spatial movement, has stressed the importance of ―departure‖ from one‘s own local
3
setting to another as a means of challenging societal and economic limitations upon personal
freedoms of movement. In her travelogue, for example, once Samman gets introduced to a life of
traveling, she makes of it an initial step to escape, search, and explore her personal identity and
the places that she visits, just like The Thousand and One Night‘s character, Sinbad (Nabulsi 9). i
I argue that the mere challenging of these socio-economically imposed norms that have stifled
her freedom and the freedom of her protagonist is recognition of the importance of mobility to
Arab women in their acquisition of agency.
Ahdaf Soueif constructs and presents a modern/postmodern disjunctive hybrid identity in
which the Egyptian woman does not valorize either Egyptian or English culture, location, or
identity, but rather engages them equally, allowing a new hybrid identity to be constructed upon
an in-between imaginative constructive cultural space that accepts the conflicting paradoxes of
this hybrid identity. It is only when travel occurs in Soueif‘s narrative that a strong female
narrative voice and subjectivity emerges independently. Soueif‘s protagonist initially enjoys
mobility and movement because of the upper-middle social class she belongs to. However, as she
matures and further travels to London, where she enjoys independence and a private life of her
own, she reclaims an independent authority over her life and her hybrid cultural identity. It is
important to note that after acquiring this hybrid identity, it will become impossible for the
female protagonist in Souief‘s novel to fully belong to a single geographic location, creating
feelings of alienation that will continue to pervade the protagonist‘s life even when she decides
finally to settle in her country of origin, Egypt.
Leila Aboulela employs the trope of translation as transfer and movement between the
protagonists‘ original homeland (Sudan) and the host land (Scotland and England). Through
doing so, she attempts to negotiate the experience of her protagonist. Abouela‘s protagonists in
4
The Translator and Minaret, arguably occupy the place of what could be described as the
―Muslimwoman,‖ a term coined by literary theorist miriam cooke (139), a move that could also
be misread as being essentialist. However, Aboulela‘s two protagonists engage nuanced and
complex identity negotiation through their journeys and so defy fixed representations of female
subjectivity. In The Translator, Aboulela‘s protagonist gains agency from her final ability to
translate herself, subjectivity, and worldview, and to connect this agency with a sense of
belonging to an Islamic faith-based identity. In Minaret, the protagonist‘s journey is
characterized by a sense of detachment, alienation, and loss until she connects herself to a place
that grounds her subjectivity in a sense of belonging, which is her religious identity.
The three authors and their texts in this study demonstrate how movement across
borders, both national and international, is a necessary step to constructing a fresh opening for
Arab female agency that is both heterogeneous and unique to each individual. The act of
movement which the protagonists in the Souief and Aboulela novels and the author-persona in
the Samman memoir engage offers mobility in women‘s subjectivities that defies any notion of
predictability or fixity. Thus, the trope of journey can be read as a subversive, transformative,
and reconstructive strategy to express female agency.
In this dissertation I read the trope of journey as a fresh means to representing Arab
women agency. The protagonists‘/persona‘s journeys are ones where these women are in search
of personal freedom and individuality, allowing place to transform them on their own terms and
also to transform the places they experience to suite their emerging selfhoods. These physical
and geographical journeys are what allow these women to experience their subjectivities in a
way that would not have been possible without the freedom in movement that allows an
unpredictable and unfixed identity. This movement is one that recognizes the heterogeneity and
5
diversity of experiencing place that necessarily leads to the different ways identities are affected
by the places they experience, which leads to dissimilarity and fluidity in identity formation.
Thus, the trope and motif of journey becomes an empowering narrative strategy that allows the
emergence of multiple and varied ways of representing Arab women‘s unpredictable and fluid
subjectivities and agencies in literary narrative.
The Journey Trope in Classical and Modern Arabic Literary Tradition
When analyzing the journey trope, the narrative strategy to express individual identity
used by the selected Arab women authors discussed in this dissertation, it becomes necessary to
keep in mind that this trope has been a recurring motif in the classical and modern Arabic literary
tradition. The travel genre (adab al-rihla)ii in Arabic and Islamic literature has been an essential
part of Arabic literary production even before the advent of Islam:
This versatile literary vehicle known as the ―travel narrative‖ in the Arab Muslim culture
has been in existence since before the advent of Islam. It straddles the genres of rahil or
rihla (journey), hijra (migration), and hajj (pilgrimage). They all involve individuals‘
inward and outward mobility for the sake of self-knowledge and self-discovery. Rahil,
according to the Encyclopedia of Islam, means ―a journey, voyage, travel; also a
travelogue. (el-Shihibi 2)
Early examples of the employment of rihla in Arabic literature are in the pre-Islamic poetic and
narrative genres that were concerned with representing themes related to the quest for individual
and collective identity. After Islam, the hijra and the hajj rihla were related in both poetry and
prose. One of the earliest examples of the employment of the travel motif in pre-Islamic poetic
narratives is the qasida, Ode, of Imru al-Qais (540 AD), which was honored by being one of the
Hanging Odes or muallaqatiii. Legendarily, these were judged to be the best poems of their era
and hung on the walls of the Ka‘ba, in Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula. Following the literary
convention of pre-Islamic poetry, and just like other qasidas written during that era, Imru al6
Qais‘ qasida encorporates the rihla as an integral structural and thematic part of the poetic
narrative of the qasida, following the nasib and preceding the fakhr part of the poem.iv
The major theme which is characteristic of the pre-Islamic ode is the description of the
poet‘s journey by horse or by camel. This is usually termed the ―travel theme.‖ In the
section the poet gives an account of his adventures in the wild life of the desert, the
hunting scenes, the difficulties he might have experienced and the danger he may have
come across. (Bakalla qtd. in el-Shihibi 17)
Both the physical and metaphorical journey is rendered in the rihla narrative section of the
qasida by Imru al-Qais and other poets of the muallaqat, such as, Atarah Ibn Shadad, Zuhair bin
Abi Sulma, and Amr Ibn Kulthum. The legends about Imru al-Qais, some which are partially
rendered in his own qasida, are as important as the poem itself; according to these legends, Imru
al-Qais was the son of wealthy tribal leader of Banu Assad; he was disowned by his father and
ostracized by the ruling elite of the tribe due to his flagrant affairs with women from lower social
classes, his illicit poetry, and his reckless lifestyle. He was forced into exile, wandering in the
desert and becoming what critics later called ―the wandering king‖ (Arberry qtd. in el-Shihibi
16). However, he then returned and joined the collective cause of his tribe to avenge the murder
of his father and the destruction of his tribe after a raid by a neighboring tribe. During his years
of wandering, Imru al-Qais wrote qasidas that described his travels and journey during his period
of exile, which followed the traditional conventions of pre-Islamic qasidas, one of which became
famous for being part of the muallaqat.
The rihla and quest narrative was employed in Atarah‘s qasida (525AD), which also
involved departure and retun journeys, where the poet expressed his individual identity and
connected it to the collective indentity of his tribe. Antarah‘s rihla and quest were also later
related in the popular Arabic sira (epic) of Antar Ibn Shadad al-Absi narrated by the persona of
his brother, Shaybub, who was also his travel companion. Sirit Antar, in its written form, is dated
7
back to the Mamluk era, sometime between 1080 and 1400, yet it is based on oral legends about
the historic pre-Islamic poet Antarah. The epic‘s national setting is pre-Islamic Arabia and
recounts the qusai-historic exploits and journeys of the legendary hero, Antarah, based on
historical details, some of which were related in his qasida (Irwin 12). This heroic sira is an
example ―of how poetry and prose are woven together with the travel motif functioning as a
unifying literary medium‖ (el-Shihibi11). From the sira, we learn that Antarah, who was the son
of an Arab father and an Abyssinian slave mother, was considered an outcast in his own society
due to his mother‘s social status, which made of him a slave in his father‘s own household. v He
departed from his tribe because his Arab father, Shaddad, was unwilling to absolve the stigma of
Antara‘s illegitimacy and acknowledge him as a legitimate son (19). The sira narrates his travels
and quest for personal freedom and identity, as well as his quest for tribal recognition as a full
member of society upon proving his prowess in tribal battle, a theme that is also related in his
qasida. His travel and mobility were directly connected to his attempt to prove his individual
identity while seeking to connect to a collective one through heroism; this attempt brought about
his emancipation when he saved his tribe from the most destructive attack they had ever faced.
El-Shihibi, who analyzes Antara‘s sira as a travel narrative, describes the mixture of his travels
and his quest for identity on a personal and collective level:
There are two reasons that make the sira of Antara especially significant within the
context of the travel or the quest narrative. First, the protagonist unlike other poets,
operates in relation to identity on two levels; hence he represents the sentiments of the
social outcast as well as the social celebrity. Second, Antara‘s quests equate the outward
mobility with the inward self-emancipation; hence he constitutes a departure from those
whose quests enjoy poetic license yet remain closely orbiting the parameters of the
collective identity. In other words, what we witness in the sira of Antara is an early
example of individual identity not only functioning on its own, but also articulating its
dissenting ideology. (16)
8
From this, it could be said that the sira is a significant travel poetic and prosaic narrative in the
classical Arabic oral literary tradition, which underscores the connection between travel and
establishing an individual and tribal identity.
Both the poets, Imru al-Qais and Antarah, in their qasidas‘ rihla sections have expressed
independency, individuality, and non-conformity to the laws of their tribes whom at a certain
period of time have outcasted them. Thus, what distinguishes Imru al-Qais and Antara‘s qasidas
is their divergence from the traditional subject matter of the qasida, where they don‘t engage in
panegyrics over their tribe or tribal leaders after their travel narratives, a convetion of the qasida
form which thay haven‘t conformed to; rather, they express their individualism and personal
subjectivities without giving credit to their tribes:
What distinguishes the poetry of Antara and Imru al-Qais from the other mu’allaqat
poets, however, is that their verses employ the travel motif to summon and celebrate the
virtues of rugged individualism rather than incessantly dwelling upon the personal traits
of those in power. They, in other words, do not subordinate their intellectual perceptions
of reality to the sociocultural mores governing the collective consciousness of their
respective tribes. (18)
Even though the two poets do finally reintegrate into their tribes and societies, their poetic
narratives stress the journey away from society as a primary theme for their personal and
individual development. Antara and Imru al-Qais‘s poetic compositions were most concerned
with articulating themes of personal identity and its relations to the collective consciousness of
their societies, a theme that will reoccur in the writings of the contemporary Arab women
discussed in this dissertation.
Despite the inherent quality in travel themes in the pre-Islamic era, travel narratives after
the dawn of Islam by male travelers have changed; subgenres emerged in which rihlas became
religious, spiritual, or political in orientation. However, el-Shihibi propounds that ―the travel or
9
migratory literature in the Arab-Islamic culture, albeit assuming a higher moral altitude
following the migration of the prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Madina (or
Yathrib) in the year 622 A.D. to escape persecution at the hands of the Meccan Quraysh
tribesmen, also has roots in the pre-Islamic era‖ (36). After Islam, travel becomes a necessary
part of the Muslims‘ physical and spiritual identity; it becomes an obligation to perform the
annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj,vi following the footsteps of the prophet Muhammad. Also,
the migration of the prophet from Mecca to Madina, the hijra, is one that Muslims have
emulated. Following his example, they have gone to new places to spread the message of the
Islamic faith. The two journeys the prophet and his companions undertook during the
establishment of the Islamic faith, in addition to the travels in search of knowledge the prophet
encouraged his followers to undertake, all motivated Muslims to start ―connecting identity to
territory‖ (cooke xxiii). According to cooke, ―the insistence [in Islam] on actual and symbolic
travel allows for the simultaneous self-positioning in the local and the global and then back to
another local, in the present and past and then back to a transformed present‖ (xxiii).
Among the widely known travelers in Arabic adab al-rihalat during the Medieval Islamic
era are Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta, whose journeys have been interpreted by critics as either
solely religiously or spiritually inspired travels, or as travels in search of knowledge, talabu alilm.vii According to el-Shihibi, the travel narratives of Ibn Jubar and Ibn Battuta could be seen to
have ―integrated the genres of rihla (journey), hijra (migration), and hajj (pilgrimage) into their
hadiths (narratives), which transmute and transmit their inner and outer progressions‖ (45). Ibn
Jubayr ( AD 1145-1217), departing from Granada, Spain, in [1183 AD], and Ibn Battuta (AD
1304-1368), departing from Tangier, Morocco, in [1325 AD], initially began their trips to
perform the hajj, in Mecca, the Arabian peninsula, and then followed it with a lifetime of travels
10
to various parts of the world to which the Islamic faith had since spread. viii El-Shihibi
underscores that even though hajj has been the central travel narrative in Arab Islamic literature,
it remains the point of departure connecting the spiritual quest with the searching for an
individual and a collective Islamic identity. Despite the different socio-historical contexts of their
travels, both Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta‘s travel narratives blend the hajj, the primary travel, with
travel in search of knowledge, producing narratives that speak of both an individual and a
collective Islamic identity. The main concern of these travelers was to explore the situation of the
Islamic nation, though they visited beyond the reaches of Islam, comparing and contrasting such
places with Islamic lands, while emphasizing the supremacy of the Islamic cultural and religious
identity. Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta, articulate individual, cultural, and religious themes of the
travel genre to give a general description of the state of the Islamic community. However, later
Arabic travel literature articulates transnational themes that are directly related to the East–West
dichotomy, and to East–West encounters and reconciliation.
The generations of modern writers in Arabic literature who have contributed to the travel
genre have travelled primarily from their Middle Eastern countries to the West (either Europe or
the United States) and have articulated themes related to the East–West encounter. One
prominent modern writer who expanded the travel genre in Arabic literary writings is Taha
Husayn (1989-1973)ix traveled to Paris to pursue his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne.
Husaynwho began his studies at al-Azhar, then the new Egyptian university, was educated under
Egyptian and Western orientalists. According to el-Shihibi, Husayn contributed to the travel
genre while articulating themes related to the East–West encounter in his novel, A Man of
Letters: A Western Adventurer (1935). The novel centered on the disappointment of the
protagonist, Adeeb, with his culture; he seeks to understand other cultures, specifically French
11
culture, which he finds hard to reconcile with his own. Yet the novel ends with Adeeb suffering,
torn between his version of Western rationalism and Eastern spirituality. This theme recurs in
Samman‘s travelogue and in Aboulela‘s two novels in this study; the authors tend to blur the
differences between their own culture and European culture, questioning the boundaries between
the two.
Tayeb Salih, who is considered the father of modern Sudanese fiction, used the travel
trope to write directly on the East–West encounter, which is characterized in his seminal novel,
Season of Migration to the North, by the ―clash of civilization‖ between the formally colonized
country, Sudan, and the colonizer, Britain (Ghazoul qtd. in Hassan 1). Salih, who lived the
majority of his life an exile in Britain, became part of a generation of postcolonial Arab literary
writers and travelers who travelled in the 1950s and 1960s to Europe, received formal education
there, and were interested in depicting the aftermath of the East–Westx encounter. In his writings,
Salih presents himself as a witness to British domination over his country, Sudan, and other
Middle Eastern countries, as well as the aftermath of that domination on the lives and
psychology of the formally colonized people. His quintessential depiction of that encounter is
Season of Migration to the North, published in 1966, a decade after Sudan achieved
independence from the British. The controlling narrative frame in the novel is the journey trope,
which makes of the novel a fictional travelogue that is considered by many postcolonial critics,
including Edward Said, a form of ―writing back‖ to Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, which is
considered the fictional colonial travel account par excellence (Said qtd. in Smith 1).
In Salih‘s novel, both the unnamed narrator and the protagonist, Mustafa Sa‘eed, travel to
the North, London specifically, and then back again to the South, Sudan, a journey that involves
cultural misperceptions, stereotypes, and postcolonial conflicts between colonizers and
12
colonized, narrated from the perspective of the colonized. According to the critic Boullata, the
novel ―emphasizes the political side of the East-West confrontation as internalized by Mustafa
Said and perverted into a vengeful feeling expressed in sexual conquests‖ (Boulata qtd. in
Rogers 1). Mustafa Sa‘eed, who travels from Sudan to Egypt and then to England, two nations
that had colonized Sudan in the past, decides to take his revenge over the history of the British
colonization of his country by preying on English women, then leading them to commit suicide,
a triumphant moment for him. However, he is defeated in London when he is sentenced to prison
for seven years for killing his English wife, Jean Morris. Upon returning to his village in Sudan,
Sa‘eed keeps the secret of his rise and defeat in London away from the people, keeping a book
he wrote of his former life in London in a secret room that later is accessed by the narrator upon
Sa‘eed‘s disappearance. The depiction of Sa‘eed‘s journey to London and back to Sudan, a
journey riddled with conflicts, clashes, and a final defeat, represents― the failure of [Salih‘s]
generation to find adequate answers to the challenge of postcolonial nationhood‖ (Hassan 299). xi
The 1988 Nobel prize winner, Nagub Mahfouz, has been one of the prominent modern
literary writers to connect adab al-rihla in Arabic literature to the modern Arabic travel genre in
the twentieth century. The Journeys of Ibn Fattouma is Mahfouz‘ parody of Ibn Battuta‘s
travelogue. Mahfouz sends the traveler, Ibn Fattouma, from his Islamic country, where he is
disillusioned and disappointed, to seek self-knowledge in other lands beyond the reach of Islam.
The imagined global travels Ibn Fattouma embarks on reflects the nature of its modern era,
where Mahfouz, without elevating any society, culture, or religion, underscores the fact that the
history of humanity is a travel metaphor that is everlasting. For Mahfouz, employing the travel
genre in literature becomes a means to representing the cosmopolitan uprootedness of modern
man.
13
Among the most prominent Arab woman writers whose works could be considered part
of the body of narratives about the female journey in modern Arab adab al-rihla are feminist and
political activist Huda Sha‘rawi (1879-1947) from Egypt, and poet and autobiographer Fadwa
Tuqan (1973-2003) from Palestine. Sha‘rawi‘s autobiography, abridged and translated as Harem
Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, details how she was brought up in and married
into the upper social strata of Egyptian society of her time and how she later become a political
activist and feminist, establishing the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923 (Golley 35). In the
autobiography, Sha‘rawi offers glimpses of her journeys and trips to Europe, where she spoke at
women‘s conferences and addressed feminist activism related to Egypt. Sha‘rawi‘s travels
allowed her to grow as an Egyptian nationalist and political activist, and a prominent Arab
feminist; upon her return to Egypt, she renounced her face veil, a revolutionary act for a woman
of her social stratum during that time period. xii Likewise, Fadwa Tuqan‘s autobiography
published in 1984, A Mountainous Journey, A Difficult One, xiii narrates Tuqan‘s life experience,
starting with her birth into a privileged, conservative, upper-class Palestinian family, continuing
through the wars that took place in Palestine, including the occupation of the West Bank in 1967,
and finally to her becoming a prominent poet who travelled to Europe, specifically England, in
the early 1960s to pursue her education at Oxford University. During her journey to England, she
documents her perception of the English people and the way she felt displaced amongst them.
Even though she and her family resisted the British mandate over Palestine, she still admired
England, seeing it as a place of knowledge, progress, and civilization. Thus she moves there to
further her formal education despite her mixed feelings towards it: ―It is the love/hate
relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. Although England featured as the hateful
enemy of the Palestinians in her memoirs, nevertheless England was a desirable destination for
14
renewal, knowledge and discovery‖ (Attar 3). Both Sha‘rawi and Tuqan resisted the English
occupation of their countries, yet they traveled to Europe to gain knowledge that would finally
become an essential part of their self-empowerment and self-actualization as strong Arab
women. In the case of these writers, travel offered them a means to reconcile their nationalistic
priorities with their own self-subjectivities and gendered identity.
Other contemporary Arab woman writers have contributed to adab al-rihla, such as the
prominent Arab feminist Nawal al-Sa‘dawi. In her travelogue, My Travels Around the World
(1986), al-Sa‘dawi fuses the travel trope in Arabic literature with a gendered Arab female
experience of traveling around the world and registering her observations as well as perceptions
of the places she visits. Al-Sa‘dawi‘s traveloguebegins with her departure from her homeland,
Egypt, claiming that the only means to challenge traditional patriarchal authority is to depart
from the limited boundaries of home. The moment of departure she experiences is challenging:
Her journey challenges her from the beginning: the government delays her departure by
demanding permission from her husband before she can depart from Cairo; however, once she
presents documentation that she is divorced they allow her to travel (al-Sa‘dawi 8). After
managing to depart, she continuously stresses the importance of subverting the societal
constructed boundaries between the private and public sphere through adopting movement and
mobility as a lifestyle. It is important to note that just like al-Sa‘dawi, Samman suffered when
departing from her homeland because she failed to acquire governmental permission to travel to
Europe .xiv The problematic moment of departure has been a recurring theme in Arab women‘s
travelogues and literary travel narratives because women have generally been associated with
domestic stasis, while men are associated with adventurous movement and exploration.
15
Some of the themes el-Sa‘dawi underscores after her initial departure and during her trips
from Egypt, to Europe, to India, and then to Africa, are related to the socio-political, sociocultural realities of the places she visits. She also pays specific attention to local and universal
issues concerning women. Aside from reporting her observations and informing the reader about
her own perceptions of the places she visits, al-Sa‘dawi also explores how her travels affect the
way she views her identity in a positive way: ―Al-Sadawi perceives identity as being formulated
in a much wider scope that transcends both national and ethnic boundaries‖ (141). She describes
how her travels change the way she looks at individual identity: ―Individual identity or individual
responsibility is inseparable from social identity or social responsibility, and the word identity is
a positive word, like democracy and freedom‖ (el-Sa‘dawi qtd. in el-Shihibi 142).
In sum, the journey trope in classical and modern Arabic literature has been employed by
both male and female writers for different purposes that were dictated by the time periods they
experienced and their individual circumstances. The inscription of journey in classical and
medieval Arabic literature was mainly done by male poets and writers; they describe their
gendered experiences, including masculine adventures, exploration, and the quest for an
individual identity and individuality that could be finally connected to a communal identity.
Modern Arabic literature employing the travel and journey motif have expanded on the classic
mode of journey to include the cultural encounter between the Middle East and the West (mainly
Europe), cultural alienation and clashes, and the resolutions of such encounters. Modern and
contemporary woman writers who employed the journey trope in their autobiographical and
fictional narratives illuminate new meanings connected to the representation of gendered
experience of place and the disruption of societal expectations once such movement occurs from
her locale to another. As opposed to travel narratives written by men, who focus on connecting
16
their individual identities with a communal one, woman writers and travelers have expressed
female subjectivity and a strong agency through negotiating the relationship between movement
and the construction of a highly personalized individual identity.
My dissertation aims at analyzing a selection that includes both a narrative about real
travels (Samman‘s travelogue) and fictionalized travel narratives written by women who use the
travel trope as a means to representing an alternative perspective on issues related to Arab
women‘s experience of place, both home and abroad, and its effects on the representation of their
subjectivities and identities in a globalized world defined by different modes of movement and
travel. Using the journey trope as an alternative mode to express Arab female subjectivity and
agency in literary narrative, whether autobiographical or fictional, Arab women writers reclaim
their own narratives, which have for so long been told by others. The trope of female journey and
travel provides Arab woman writers with both a means to subvert conventional accounts of
defining Arab women‘s subjectivities and a means to reclaim their own agency through
movement and travel.
The Authors and Texts
Ghada Samman
Ghada Samman was born in Damascus, Syria in 1942. Her mother died when she was
very young, leaving her to be raised by her father and her paternal grandmother, who worked all
her life as a seamstress to support her children‘s education, and from whom Ghada admits that
she learned independence at a very early age (Nabulsi 13). Samman‘s father was an academic
who had acquired his PhD from the Sorbonne in political economics, worked as a university
professor at Damascus University, and then became the Minster of Education in the early 1960s.
17
Though her father was educated in France, he was highly interested in Arabic folklore and
literature, an interest he extended to Ghada at an early age. According to Nabulsi, Samman grew
up during her early years in a conservative Damascene society of the 1940s and 1950s, an
experience that she admits has colored her writings about Damascus generally (14). She is an
acclaimed journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and poet whose writings have been translated
into several languages, including Spanish, Russian, English and French, which has made of her a
widely read Arab woman author in the Arab world as well as countries who read her works in
translation. However, when reading Samman‘s texts and contexts, one has to be aware that
Samman‘s target readership initially was mainly Arab as she insisted on writing in Arabic and to
an Arab readership.
She earned her BA from the University of Damascus in 1963 and then left for Beirut,
Lebanon, to pursue an MA in English theatre from the American University in Beirut, where she
wrote her master‘s thesis on the Theatre of the Absurd (Al Waref 1). There her career as a
journalist and literary writer was established, and she never returned to Syria. She moved to
London to work on a PhD in English literature, a degree she never earned because of the shift of
interest from academia to journalism, and thus she traveled around Europe, working as a
journalist. She finally settled in Paris after the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. Currently, she
travels between Paris and her other home in Beirut. Her constant traveling during her work as a
journalist and her later traveling between her two homes highly influenced her writings, where
she addresses cross-cultural issues and cultural alienation in both fiction and travelogue.
Among the issues that have preoccupied Samman‘s personal life and writings have been
the Lebanese civil war, class issues, social alienation, oppressive patriarchy, and feminism. Her
novel Beirut 75 (1975) is about a city on the verge of civil war. The novel addresses the social,
18
political, class and bureaucratic decadence of Beirut during that time period. However, the
horrors of that war, which plunged Lebanon into sectarian strife for about a decade, tearing apart
the very fabric of society and highlighting the oppressive elements within Lebanese society, she
addresses in her later novel Beirut Nightmares (1976). In her collection of travel accounts, The
Body Is a Traveling Suitcase (1979), which is the first among five other travelogues she writes,
Samman recounts her trips between different countries in Europe, and several Arab countries,
detailing her observations of her surroundings, as well as how these observations affected her
perception of herself and the places she visited. In her five other travelogues that follow,
Samman continues to recounts her experiences traveling through Europe, several Asian
countries, and America, escaping and lamenting the civil war taking place back in Beirut.
In her fiction, which, to some degree, is shaped by her personal experiences xv, she uses
travel as a form of both escape and search: an escape from war and/or an oppressive economic
and social reality that both she and her protagonists refuse to abide, and a search for an
individuality that is directly linked to liberating the Arab woman from both economic and social
repressive elements in Arab societies. Throughout her writings, she displays an unwavering
revolutionary feminist attitude, claiming a sexual revolutionxvi is necessary to end the way Arab
patriarchy was dominant according to her personal experience. Most importantly, Samman
claims that a sexual revolution should be ―part and parcel of a general revolution of the Arab
individual to retrieving his/her freedoms, part of which includes economic freedoms, political
freedoms, and intellectual freedoms‖ (Samman qtd. in Nabulsi 80). xvii
Beirut 75
19
Set a year prior to the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war, Beirut 75 illustrates the
decadence, power abuse, bureaucracy, economic and social corruption that plague Lebanese
society at the time. It is a narrative that focuses mainly on the separate journeys the two
protagonists, Yasmeena and Farah, take to Beirut, a place they hope will offer them social,
economic, and sexual liberation far from Damascus, the city they escape. Leaving the restricted
life and jobs they had in Syria, Yasmeena and Farah dream of the abundance of opportunities
and a bright future Beirut will offer them. However, the journey is fraught with menacing
incidents, foreshadowed by three veiled women dressed in black occupying the back seat of the
cab and beginning with a flat tire, which in turn foreshadows the total destruction of both
protagonists in Beirut. Instead of Beirut being the city of freedom, and endless economic
opportunities, it becomes a grave for the female protagonist and a mental asylum for the male
protagonist. The sexual, economic, political, and bureaucratic decadence that plague Beirut
during that time period, all together operate as the reasons behind the failure of the protagonist to
gain their agency and freedom.
As Farah and Yasmeena arrive in Beirut in the cab, their routes diverge, as they search
for better economic opportunities in the alluring city. Yasmeena, who searches for riches, love,
and sexual freedom, gets introduced to the son of a wealthy Lebanese business man, Nimr, who
showers her with wealth and sexual satisfaction, but only temporarily. Even though Yasmeena‘s
voyage to Beirut offers her sexual fulfillment, it does not change the fact that on a wider social
front, sexual liberation is linked to economic and political liberation, aspects lacking in Lebanese
society at the time. At a certain point, she becomes dangerously addicted to sex and overly
obsessed with the lavish lifestyle she had been deprived of before she reached Lebanon. This
20
sexual enjoyment and the money she is offered present Yasmeena moments of liberation;
however, at the end they both are major factors that bring about her doom.
The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase
Published in 1979, The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase covers a period of twelve years of
Samman‘s life, starting from her first travel to London to pursue her PhD in English literature in
1964 and continuing through her travels to several European countries as a reporter and a
creative writer. During these travels, she assumes the role of both observer and critic, evaluating
the different cultures with which she comes in contact. It is during these particular travels that
she assumes a detached position and experiences Europe, as well asSyrian and Lebanon as both
an insider and an outsider. However, Samman is disappointed throughout her trips in Europe,
especially in London where she notices that the media and mainstream discourse about the Arab
world is biased. She finds that it is difficult for her to connect to Europe or to ignore such
discourses. Samman partially blames the Arabs for not being able to defend themselves and their
image before Europe and their media, but then she realizes that such discourses are related to the
imbalanced power structure between the Middle East and England. The travelogue is colored
with a pessimistic tone towards the end, where Samman finds herself forced to settle in Lebanon
temporarily until she is forced to leave because of the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. Also,
during the travelogue, Samman falls victim of stereotypically observing the people, traditions
and cultures of the Other according to preconceived descriptions, not being able to free herself
from making ―home‖ the point of departure when evaluating the Other.
Ahdaf Soueif
21
Born in Cairo in 1950 to upper-middle-class, academic parents, Dr. Fatima Mousa and
Dr. Mustafa Soueif, who both studied in England to then returned to Egypt and teach at the
University of Cairo. Ahdaf Soueif received her education in both Egypt and England. She is a
novelist, short-story writer, and commentator on socio-political and cultural affairs in both
England and Egypt. Soueif lived part of her childhood in England, while her mother was
obtaining a PhD at the University of London. Soueif got her MA in English literature at the
American University in Cairo in 1973, and then left for England in the same year to pursue her
PhD in linguistics at the University of Lancaster. She has taught at several universities in both
Egypt, including the University of Cairo. Currently, she writes regularly for the Guardian in the
UK and a weekly column for al-Shorouk in Egypt. She lives between England and Egypt, both
places she considers home.
As Soueif lives in two worlds, Egypt and England, occupying a ―third space‖ that is
uniquely personal and hybrid, her writings also oscillate between those two worlds. Even though
she writes her fiction primarily in English, she employs hybrid literary techniques and linguistic
expressions to reflect both her Egyptian and English hybridity (Abdul-Halim 1). Among her
Anglo-Arab contemporaries who write on issues related to hybridity are Fadia Faqir, Zeina
Ghandour, Sabiha al-Khemir, and Leila Aboulela, all of whom live between their Arab
homelands and Britain (Al Maleh 13). This hybridity, which is an intrinsic part of Soueif‘s
personal identity and writings, allows her to operate within a third space that encompasses a
diverse range of thematic expressions. Among the themes she writes on are gender issues,
sexuality, cultural alienation, and tensions and interaction that arises from living in two worlds,
Egypt and England. In her collections of short stories, Aisha (1983) and Sandpiper (1996), and
her two novels, In the Eye of the Sun (1992) and The Map of Love (1999), Soueif has her female
22
protagonists travel between Egypt and England, where they negotiate borderlines, carving unique
hybrid identities that allow them to take control of their own personal lives and narratives.
Likewise, Soueif herself is a traveler between the Egypt and England who links her actual
movement between these two worlds to movement in her texts, fictionalizing her journey and
focusing on the ways in which her personal travel shapes her dynamic textual creations.
xviii
Among Soueif‘s journalistic and theoretical writings is Mezzaterra: Fragments from the
Common Ground (2004), a collection of essays written over twenty-five years. Among the issues
she writes on in this non-fictional book is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, socio-political
commentary on both Egypt and England, and criticism of religious, social, and political conflicts
between the Arab world and Western countries. Initially, she constructs a theory about a
theoretical time and place that represents the hybrid spirit of Cairo of the 1960s, which she calls
―Mezzaterra,‖ a ―common place‖ where cultures and traditions meet and inform one another,
creating a middle groundxix of knowledge and positive interaction. However, she laments the
disappearance of this Mezzaterra as the 1980s and 1990s roll in with the political and military
powers in the world move greatly out of balance: ―[the] political direction the world was taking
seemed to undermine every aspect of this identity‖ (8). In addition, Soueif published her personal
reflections and account on the recent Egyptian revolution of 2011 in her book, Cairo: My City,
Our Revolution (2012). In this journalistic account, Soueif reflects on the first few month of the
revolution and the initial hopes of the possible changes that could ensue in Egyptian politics and
society as a result.
In addition, Soueif translated two works from Arabic to English, one of which is Mourid
Barghouthi‘s memoir, I Saw Ramallah.xx It is important to note that Soueif has not written her
23
own personal narrative of return but has chosen to translate Barghouthi‘s narrative of exile and
return.
In the Eye of the Sun
Published in1992, In the Eye of the Sun has been hailed by critics including Edward Said
as a successful bridge between two different cultures, the Egyptian and the English. Said
celebrates Soueif‘s employment of the hijra or, in Egyptian dialect, ―hegra‖xxi, an emigration
trope, wherein the protagonist, Asya al-Ulama, acquires a complex hybrid identity of her own
constructionIn the novel, Asya is born to an upper-middle-class Egyptian family of the 1960s, a
time characterized by openness to English language and culture. Thus, Asya is brought up in a
hybrid cultural space, Mezzaterra. Later, she leaves Egypt for England to pursue her PhD. Her
journey to England is laden with transcultural exchange. Once in England, Asya is exposed to
different cultural experiences that plunge her into negotiating her experiences both in Egypt and
in England, an attempt to investigate and reconstruct a hybrid identity she feels comfortable with.
However, her initial upbringing in a hybrid Egyptian social class makes Asya inclined to
engaging different experiences early in her life.
Asya‘s first chance at leaving Egypt, to Italy first and then to Beirut, expose her to
sexuality and sexual encounters with a foreign man and then with her lover, Saif, in a way that
was never possible back home. After returning to Egypt and after being engaged to Saif for three
years, Asya marries him. The marriage is never sexually consummated, a fact that will finally
result in the deterioration of the relationship, leading finally to a divorce between the couple.
During the complications surrounding her marriage, Asya leaves for England to pursue her PhD.
While in England, Asya has an affair with an English man, Gerald Stone, who provides her with
24
emotional and sexual satisfaction, even if for a short period of time. Aside from being exposed to
different sexual and gendered discourses both in Egypt and England, Asya also experiences her
individual independence in England away from people and the cultural pressure that used to
dictate her life, which in return allows her to regain a strong personal voice and agency,
reclaiming an authority over her own life. During her physical, emotional, sexual, and
psychological journeys, Asya gets exposed to different experiences that contribute to her
acquiring a hybrid identity that is uniquely Egyptian and English simultaneously.
Leila Aboulela
Leila Aboulela, an Egyptian Sudanese writer, was born in Cairo in 1964 and grew up in
Khartoum, her family‘s original home. She was first educated in Sudan, where she attended the
Khartoum American School. She obtained her BA in economics from Khartoum University in
1985, then pursued an MS in statistics at the London School of Economics. She is an acclaimed
Arab novelist, and a short-story writer. Her writings engage, negotiate, and confront Islamic,
Orientalist, and Western discourses and stereotypes that mainly misrepresent and dictate the
Muslim woman identity. Her female protagonists challenge essentialist and reductionist labeling
of their characters, even when assuming an Islamic-based identity, since they are dynamic
characters whose cross-cultural experiences inform the nuanced details of their acquired identity.
The Translator, Aboulela‘s first novel, written and published in English in 1999, was
longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2000 and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards in 2001. The
novel addresses issues related to the translation of self, culture, place, and religion upon
encountering a foreign land. Aboulela‘s second novel, Minaret, published in 2005, also written
in English, is a story about dislocation, migration, Islamic religious and spiritual struggle, and
25
exile in Britain. It was also longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Literary Award. In
addition, Aboulela wrote a collection of short stories, Coloured Lights, published in 2001, which
also engages the experience of Muslim African immigrants moving between Sudan and Scotland
or England. The fictionalized journeys registered in Aboulela‘s works portray female
protagonists facing cross-cultural encounters as well as personal struggles with faith and
spirituality while living in the West. Aboulela now lives and travels between Abu Dhabi and
Aberdeen. Her latest novel is Lyrics Alleys, published in 2010, which follows the life of a family
relocated in Cairo after the stirring up of tension in Sudan before the country‘s independence
from British rule.
The Translator
The Translator tells the story of Sammar, who travels from Khartoum to Aberdeen, in
order to work as a translator of Arabic documents into English for an acclaimed Scottish
university professor and scholar of Middle Eastern history and postcolonial studies, Rae Isles.
She not only translates texts for Rae, she also falls in love with him—a love that eventually is
consummated after Rae converts to Islam.As the novel unfolds and through flashbacks, we learn
that she has traveled to Aberdeen in the past with a husband who was pursuing a medical degree,
but who was killed in a car accident, after which she returns to Sudan. While in Sudan, she is
prevented by her mother-in-law from accepting any marriage proposals, because her mother-inlaw blames her for the death of her son (Sammar‘s husband), and believes that Sammar should
dedicate her time to raising Sammar‘s son—a son whom Sammar wishes had died in the car
accident instead of his father.
26
The two journeys Sammar takes in her past and present from Khartoum to Aberdeen are
reflected in the back-and-forth temporal setting that illustrates two dimensions in her personal
growth: her reclaiming her voice to face the oppressive elements of her life back in Sudan,
namely her mother-in-law, and the other, her growing out of the oppositional paradigm that
marks her as the Other in the West, namely when Rae converts to Islam instead of Sammar
compromising her religious worldview. While Sammar learns how to insert herself into the West
as an independent woman with an Islamic worldview, donning a hijab or Islamic headcovering,
facing both Islamic traditional and orientalist Western discourses about the Muslim Arab
woman, she learns that the way to do so is by making the West a place that could be home,
despite the Arab and Sudanese cultural baggage that still marks her as different. Aboulela‘s
narrative conclusion in the novel, wherein Sammar has neither to assimilate to Western culture
by adopting a secular worldview nor to conform to a traditional Sudanese cultural worldview,
offers a new path for the mobile Muslim woman, who both embraces her independence and finds
strength in applying her religious/spiritual worldview to make out of the West a home.
Minaret
In Minaret, Aboulela continues to investigate issues of gender, sexuality, religious
identity, and the West. Najwa, a Sudanese Muslim woman forced into exile in Britain, negotiates
her past, as an aristocratic, secular Westernized woman living in Sudan, and her present, as a
practicing Muslim working as a housemaid for a rich Arab woman. The novel consists of five
chapters that shift systematically between Najwa‘s past in Sudan and her present exile in
London. This temporal and geographic discontinuity and shifting is significant, as Aboulela
allows the reader to actively participate in not only the physical journey Nawja takes, but also
27
her fall from one social status to another, from adapting a Western lifestyle to an Islamic one,
and from being attached to the material life to the spiritual.
We learn from the prologue that Najwa has undergone an Islamic and spiritual awakening
that separates her from her previous life in Sudan, as well as from her previous self as the
daughter of a corrupt politician-businessman. Then, in chapter 1, and as the rest of the chapters
follow, we journey with her back and forth between her past and present. We learn about her life
in Sudan prior to the 1985 coup that led to her father‘s execution and her exile in London with
her mother and her twin brother Omar. Prior to this, Najwa‘s family had lived a life of leisure
defined by Western standards of secular materialism. At the university, she had fallen in love
with Anwar, a student activist who was part of the political party that would overthrow the
―corrupt‖ government, including Najwa‘s father. Najwa‘s girlfriends at the university had been
from her same social class, their sole interest being to live a materialistic lifestyle, as shown by
the clothes they purchased, the private parties they threw, and their vacations in Europe. As
Najwa‘s circle of friends at the university had belonged to the secular, upper-class, urban strata
of Sudanese society, she had been intrigued by the more traditional female students who donned
traditional headscarves and thawbs (traditional Sudanese women‘s dresses).
After the government is overthrown and Najwa‘s father is arrested and executed, she is
displaced in London and becomes a poor woman who has to face the hardships of life, including
becoming a maid for rich Arab families. However, Najwa starts to recollect herself once she
reconnects with the Muslim community at the local mosque in her area. From that moment on,
Najwa undergoes a religious and spiritual awakening that contributes to her final selfempowerment. For Najwa, the secular West becomes the space where she sees her identity as
28
essentially Muslim. It is not her faith-based identity that defines her, but rather the nuanced,
complex negotiation between different elements in her life.
Dissertation Structure
My analysis of the trope of journey, travel, and mobility in the life and work of Ghada
Samman, and the works of Ahdaf Soueif, and Leila Aboulela is centered on the time periods the
authors engage and write in. It is important to contextualize the modes of travel the authors
employ and the way they negotiate specific socio-historic discourses, while engaging the
overlapping discourses on Arab women during the eras they address.
Every chapter in the dissertation features a selection of work/s of an author, in which
each author engages the social context, gendered power structures, and dominant discourses at
home and abroad about the Arab woman during their time periods, as well as the theoretical
responses to such discourses. These authors use travel as their narrative device, engaging identity
politics and negotiating the provisional cultural spaces and places that play into the construction
of their protagonists‘ subjectivities. The subjectivities the authors create, construct, and represent
suggest that the narratives are dependent on and respond to the dominant discourses on the Arab
woman represented. Thus, I have decided that the temporal arrangement of the chapters is
necessary in order to illustrate specific discourses and how they correspond to social contexts
that misrepresent Arab women at times.
The authors and the selected literary texts are not meant to be representative of only the
preoccupations of the Arab woman writers and the issues they explore. Rather, the selection is
premised upon how these authors‘ preoccupations in their personal lives as well as literary
writings represent the journey trope. To read the trope of mobility and travel in these narratives
29
as the site of challenge, deconstruction, construction, and reconstruction of the myriad
subjectivity positions Arab women adopt illuminates new ways of understanding Arab female
agency. Most importantly, the authors employ the trope of travel as narrative strategy to
deconstruct the traditional dichotomy of male mobility and female domesticity.
The first chapter in this dissertation defines moments of departure from the economic and
socio-political ideologies governing women‘s travel and mobility during the mid-1970s, the
decade during which Ghada Samman wrote her travel accounts and the time period she
represents in her literary writings. This chapter defines the departure, escape, and quest tropes
that the author employs in two works, The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase and Beirut 75. The
departure and quest the female protagonist/persona experience represent moments of feminist
recognition and awareness of the economic, socio-political, cultural, and sexual restrictions and
limitations facing these women, whether persona or protagonist. The females in both works
challenge the dominant societal expectations of female mobility. Even though the writer and
protagonist in this chapter are defined by a sense of escape from the status quo to explore the
limitations that are authorized by the economic, political, sexual, and gendered social order, the
mere challenging of societal expectations remains revolutionary. The awareness of both the
internal and external conflicts which Arab females were challenging and negotiating during that
time period becomes an initial step to the acknowledgment of the importance of mobility and
travel in their acquiring agency.
The second chapter investigates the possibility of an alternative vision of Arab women‘s
subjectivities as deployed in Ahdaf Soueif‘s In the Eye of the Sun. I analyze how journey and
mobility tropes in Soueif‘s works offer an alternative representation and new possibilities for
expressing identity and agency, where her female protagonist reconstructs a subjectivity that is
30
hybrid and intensely individual based on both her hybrid cultural experience back home in
Egypt, and her later temporal relocation in England.
The third chapter illustrates how a member of a new generation of cosmopolitan Arab
Muslim women literary writers post 9/11 has been exploring, negotiating, and challenging
Islamic, Orientalist, and Western discourses about the fluid identitites of Muslim woman. My
main concern in this chapter is to show how Leila Aboulela represents the concept of
Muslimwoman in the construction of her female protagonists‘ subjectivity in The Translator and
Minaret, both novels where she creates independent protagonists, who negotiate a cross-cultural
life in the Sudan and Europe. The personal, individual subjectivities her protagonists acquire are
informed by both their cross-cultural experiences and their experience as Muslim women in both
Sudan and Scotland/England. In Aboulela‘s novels the Muslimwoman construction is one that is
challenged and negotiated, as the complex cross-cultural experiences of her protagonists are
what mainly inform their identities even when they finally assume a religious identity as one
dimension of their multi-layered subjectivity.
Through this temporal arrangement of chapters, I examine how the narrative trope of
women‘s mobility and travel engages aspects of the social context that informs Samman, Soueif,
and Aboulela‘s writings. Each writer approaches the trope of journey and travel in several key
modes that correspond with certain socio-political moments that affect women‘s lives,
negotiating the ever-changing social position and subjectivity of their protagonists. The different
and varied modes of the trope of female mobility and journey that I analyze in the selected works
engage and/or challenge the overlapping dominant ideological discourses on the Arab woman
during the last succeeding decades. Yet the construction of a subjectivity that is ever developing
and changing is best represented through the trope of mobility and travel.
31
Theoretical Framework
This dissertation makes use of postcolonial feminist theory, Arab feminism,
postcolonialism, and travel writings and theories. Since it addresses the trope of women‘s
mobility and travel, primarily moving from an Arab country to a European one, except in the
case of Yasmeena, as experienced by Arab woman authors and their protagonists, the primary
general theoretical framework that has been useful in my analysis is postcolonial feminism, the
premise of which deals with the intersection between the postcolonial experience and the
gendered experience of women in the formerly colonized Third World. Specific to my
dissertation is the Arab woman‘s experience. Since the Arab woman authors and protagonists in
the texts I analyze are mobile, journeying not only between national boarders but international
ones, primary between the Middle East and Europe, they not only challenge Orientalist
misrepresentations of their lives, but they also challenge existing gendered ideologies within
their own cultures and the dominant Western discourses that propose to ―know‖ who the Arab
woman is.
Travel theory has been useful to my overall reading of the trope of journey in Arab
women‘s narratives for understanding the formation of identity and the various ways movement
and journey affect the expression and representation of personal and cultural identity. The
journey trope complicates the relationship between identities, belonging, and home in the literary
narratives I analyze, where journey becomes a means to creating new spaces of belonging within
or away from one‘s place of origin. Trinh T. Minh-ha‘s theorization on the representation of the
―self‖ and ―other‖ when traveling and their relationship to belonging and language in her article
―Other than myself/my other self‖ deconstructs the dichotomous way of the expression of self
and the perception of otherness. The trope of journey in this dissertation highlights how the
32
conception of the self undergoes transformation in ways that incorporate what a person once has
thought of as ―otherness‖ in order to cope with the new setting the protagonist/persona
experiences. Thus, identity formation is a fluid process that takes into account the unstable
boundaries between the self and the other.
The metaphor ―travel as writing and writing as travel‖
xxii
which Michael Butor proposes
in his theorization on travel writing is one that is useful to my analysis of Samman‘s The Body Is
a Traveling Suitcase. Samman‘s goal behind writing her travelogue is to represent her journey
experiences as a travel journal because from the start, she sets out on her travels in order to
document them in writing, illustrating the relationship between travel and writing that Butor
proposes. Also, the concept and metaphor of ―Narrative is Travel‖ developed by travel theorist
Kai Mikkonen is useful to my reading of Samman‘s travelogue since Samman in her introduction
invites the readers to participate in her travels by choosing a title that best describes the
travelogue from a list of titles she provides. The act of speaking directly to the readers of her
travelogue is significant since through this act, Samman invites the reader to participate not only
in the reading process, but also in the travels themselves. Thus, to read Samman‘s travelogue is
to travel with her on her journey through the various countries she visits and to register her
experiences of place as if they were the readers‘ own.
Moreover, my analysis engages feminist, postcolonial, and feminist postcolonial concepts
and tropes developed by theorists such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Chandra Mohanty, Amal
Amireh, Leila Ahmed, and miriam cooke. Edward Said‘s initial deconstruction of the contested
imaginative borders separating the Occident and the Orient in his seminal book, Orientalism,
provides an initial theoretical point of departure for my examination of identity formation across
different geographic and cultural boarders. This dissertation takes into account the instability of
33
categories such as ―East,‖ West,‖ as these constructions are ever shifting and instable imagined
cultural and geographic boundaries. The trope of journey this dissertation highlights is one that
underscores the instability of these categories and participates in the discussion about the
constantly shifting boundaries between these imagined geographic and cultural borderlines. This
discussion informs my analysis of the fluid representation of the cross-cultural experiences and
subjectivities of Arab women. Also, Said‘s claims that identity is never viewed as ahistorical,
monolithic, ―pure,‖ or static informs my approach; I read the trope of female journey as a
strategy to deconstruct the very notion of a monolithic, essentialized, and static Arab female
subjectivity. Arab women‘s identities are multi-layered, multi-dimensional, ever changing, and
shaped and reshaped by the experiences they go through. The subjectivities I analyze are
unfixed, fluid, and constantly changing, according to the experiences of movement that change
them.
In addition, since this is a gendered study concerning the construction, conception, and
representation of the Arab female subjectivity in literature and literary discourse, I make use of
Spivak and Mohanty‘s literary theories on issues of misrepresentation. Dominant discourses of
power in both past and present have represented the Arab Muslim woman as essentially
submissive, oppressed, silent, undereducated, and static. Even mainstream Western feminist
discourses have also contributed and perpetuated that image with the assumption that women, as
a universal category, are essentially the same and demand the same freedoms and rights
(Mohanty 338). This premise fails because it generalizes the concerns and priorities of Western
feminists in a way that obscures the priorities of women from other cultures and societies. The
authors of the literary works I analyze complicate every representation and image of the Arab
woman that has appeared in dominant discourse by constructing single subjectivities that are
34
multilayered, heterogeneous, and ever evolving, women who speak on their own terms and have
a voice that marks them as individuals.
In her highly influential article ―Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses,‖ postcolonial feminist Chandra Mohanty highlights the problems Western feminism
has representing the Third World woman. Mohanty argues that Western feminism in its
intervention, supposedly to assist women of the Third World in their struggles, has instead
assisted imperialism in its exploitation of gender as a justification for imperialism. Also, the way
Western feminism categorizes all women in one homogenous generalized category under the
banner of ―global sisterhood,‖ assuming that the experience of women is the same worldwide
and that their feminist priorities are therefore common to all, is a fallacy. These same concerns
that Mohanty expresses in her article are those that push Arab woman writers to engage in their
own writings the representation of the varied experiences of Arab women and the strategies of
self-representation they engage.
In addition, Homi Bhabha‘s concepts of ―hybridity‖ and ―third-space,‖ which he developed in
The Location of Culture (1994), have been major concepts the three writers, especially Souief
and Aboulela, engage while creating their protagonists and constructing their narratives. In the
literary works I analyze, boundaries of ―the East,‖ represented as the original homelands Sudan
and Egypt, and ―the West,‖ represented mainly as Britain and Scotland, meet and blur at times
because the journeys the authors and their protagonists take between those two worlds defy any
fixed notion of experience and subjectivity. For Bhabha, hybridity is the process in which the
colonial authority tries to render the identity of the colonized, the Other, within a fixed
framework but then fails, producing ―not self and other but the otherness of the self‖ (44). Then
he goes on, stating that hybridity is a form of ―in-betweenness,‖ where ―the cutting edge of
35
negotiation and translation‖ occupies a ―third space‖ (9). What is unique about this third space is
that it blurs the limitations of existing boundaries, dismantles any hierarchal positioning, and
calls into question established notions of culture and identity. The space a subject occupies is ―an
ambivalent site‖ where cultural meaning and representation have no ―primordial unity of fixity‖
(9). Both Aboulela and Soueif produce narratives that represent hybrid experiences where the
protagonist move from Egypt and Sudan, to Britain and Scotland, yet the ways the hybrid
experience is tackled in these works are different. In this third space, the boundaries of identities
and cultures are brought into question, destabilized, and reconstructed to form a new alternative,
one that is hybrid and, in a sense, cosmopolitan. For example, in In the Eye of the Sun, Soueif‘s
protagonist travels between Egypt and Britain, where she negotiates the borderlines of these two
spaces against her individual identity, carving a unique hybrid identity that does not valorize any
specific cultural experience over another, and defining herself rather in terms of the unresolved
paradoxes that blur her cultural experiences.
Furthermore, the term Muslimwoman is useful when analyzing the works of Leila
Aboulela and the way she constructs and represents her female protagonists‘ experiences and
subjectivities. Aboulela represents this concept in the construction of her female protagonists‘
subjectivity in The Translator and Minaret, yet deconstructing the dominant orientalist, Western,
and Islamic traditional discourses on the Arab Muslim woman. I argue that Aboulela‘s female
protagonists derive their agency from negotiating the Muslimwoman identity against their
complex experiences of place, and they eventually construct their individual, personal
subjectivities out of this engagement. Yet, one should be aware that employing the concept of
―the Muslimwoman‖ could be easily misread as either esseintialzing the experience of Muslim
women or essentializing the types of narratives written and produced by Muslim women. It is
36
important to note that when I read Aboulela‘s narratives through the concept of the
Muslimwoman, I tend to analyze them as part of the varied corpus of literary narratives written
by and about Muslim women. While Aboulela‘s narratives could be misread as essentilizing
Muslim women experiences, I read them as individual narratives that add up to the varied
representations of Muslim women‘s experiences.
Moreover, Amal Amireh and Lisa Majaj‘s book Going Global: The Transitional
Reception of Third World Women Writers is especially useful to my overall analysis of the
challenges that face Arab authors as their texts travel from the Middle East to Europe and the
United States. The challenges and obstacles that face these contemporary Arab woman authors
who address an international audience are serious, since these women always have to compete
with the grounded stereotypical images of the Arab Muslim woman that appear in the dominant
discourses and literary productions in the West; these reduce the Arab Muslim woman to either
an exotic figure or a figure that needs to be saved. Facing these stereotypes and
misrepresentations becomes challenging for these authors, who are concerned with constructing
Arab female subjectivities that are intensely personal and individual, while negotiating
misrepresentations of their images and experiences. Yet these woman authors do not allow any
set of discourse to manipulate their representations, instead creating unique narratives that
represent the Arab woman experiences as unique and intensely individual.
According to Amireh and Majaj, Third World women and their literary production have
started to gain more space in the First World context, though in a way that squeezes them into
presupposed locations and conditions regarding their subjectivities and their histories. Western
discourse continues to categorize and stereotype them. This is due to the unbalanced politics of
publication in the West, which selects the texts and narratives representing the Arab female
37
experience and makes them accessible to the Western audience via translation and publication;
this continues to feed the stereotypical representation of Arab Muslim women, leaving it
unchallenged. Thus, the reception of these women and the reading of their writings in the
Western context most likely further reinforce the preconceived constructed image of the Arab
woman (Amireh and Majaj 3). Amireh and Majaj suggest that unless Third World women and
their texts are ―historicized‖ when journeying to the Western context, they will continue to be
received and read within a hegemonic discourse that is constructed and imposed by Western
representations of the Arab woman constructed hegemonic imposed discourse that continues to
stereotype them. It is vital that readers in the First World who are reading texts by and about
women in the Third World stay alert so that the traveling of these texts from one context to the
other is not affected by reception context and politics, ―where their meanings [are] reproduced
and reshaped to fit local agenda‖ (3).
Samman, Soueif, and Aboulela, and the texts under study in this dissertation, all travel
from their own contexts to the Western context, where they participate in the reception politics
that governs the works of Third World women who travel to the First World. These texts
demonstrate a range of assumptions and images about the Arab Muslim woman, including that of
the victim of socio-political, patriarchal, and cultural repression, in addition to an empowering
image that presents them as powerful, active agents of change that challenge expectations within
their own cultures and in the Western context. These writers find themselves in a position where
they are obliged to confront this imposed politics of reception by targeting it directly through
acting upon their own politics of location, where they engage the cultural specificities and
contexts in which their female protagonists emerge. They also offer in their representations
narratives about empowered women who have long been obscured or under-represented inside
38
and outside their own respective cultures. Instead of constructing texts and female protagonists
who claim to be authentic representations of the Arab woman experience and subjectivities, or
ones who are predictable by a Western audience, these writers insist repeatedly that the
experiences and subjectivities of Arab women are heterogeneous and cannot be squeezed into a
one-dimensional paradigm.
The following study proposes that while Arab women have been represented in literary
text, they have been reinscribed in stereotypical ―pregiven locations‖ that set boundaries and
limitations to such representations by authors and texts (Mohanty qtd. in Amireh 2). Also, this
representation of the Arab female experience remains inadequate, since the construction of their
subjectivity and their literary texts have been ―dehistoricized‖ and ―decontextualized‖ (2). The
trope of female mobility, journey, and travel utilized by the three authors in this study offers a
new narrative technique and strategy that contextualizes the construction and representation of
the Arab woman‘s varied experiences, identities, and agency.
Thus, to read the trope of mobility and travel in Arab women‘s narratives as the site of
challenge, deconstruction, transformation, and reconstruction of identity is to offer a new
understanding of Arab female agency. Specifically, the employment of tropes of movement and
travel as a novel narrative strategy by Samman, Soueif, and Aboulela is to offer instrumental
means of challenging the limitations of reception politics, where the persona/protagonists and
texts take on an agency of their own, traveling within their own cultural boundaries and crossing
them to the West, while allowing their heterogeneous subjectivities to emerge and constantly
evolve.
39
CHAPTER ONE
Leaving the Threshold: Departure, Escape and a Women’s Place in Ghada Samman’s
Beirut 75 and The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase
Introduction
Ghada Samman‘s protagonist in Beirut 75, Yasmeena, embarks on a journey from
Damascus to Beirut in pursuit of social, economic, emotional, and sexual liberation. As she
departs from Syria and leaves Damascus en route to Beirut, she enjoys a sense of relief, esc aping
further from the social and economic oppressive city of her upbringing to a supposedly liberating
one. During her journey, Yasmeena is introduced to love, sex, and riches, pleasures that allow
her to negotiate her newly acquired luxurious life and its effect on her sexual identity. Although
this sexual enjoyment does offer Yasmeena an aspect of liberation, it ultimately leaves her
emotionally unfulfilled when she is rejected by the man she falls in love with. Also, her affair
leads to her tragic end, as her brother, who was aware of and accepted the affair as long as she
provided him with money, kills her, claiming to cleanse his family honor. Nevertheless, the
sexual and economic fulfillment Yasmeena enjoys for a brief moment provides her with a
profound, if short-lived, awareness of her subjectivity as an independent woman. The mere
challenging of elements in her life that suppress her individuality and sexuality through mobility
and travel is an initial step to recognizing the limitations imposed upon females due to their
sexual and economic limitations. I argue that the sexual suppression Yasmeena experiences in
Damascus is a direct result of the social class, economic conditions and poverty of her family, a
curse that continues to haunt her even in Beirut, where she is murdered by her brother upon
failing to provide him with money. The primary reason for Yasmeena‘s emotional and sexual
suppression prior to and after the journey she undertakes from Damascus to Beirut continues to
40
persist in her life due to the limited economic conditions that continue to plague her life even in
Beirut, leading to her ultimate demise.
Contextualizing Beirut 75: Venturing Out Beyond Societal Expectations
Beirut 75 is a narrative that focuses on the lives of Yasmeena, Farah, and three other male
characters, who at the beginning of the novel all board the same cab from Damascus en route to
Beirut. Each departs to find elements missing in life back in Damascus, a successful career,
fame, riches, safety, and social and sexual freedom. The first half of the narrative is divided
nearly equally, each chapter following the life and inner thoughts of one of the five characters,
revealing the attractions Beirut offers them. Men‘s and women‘s experiences are explored
almost equally:
It bears noting that in keeping with Samman‘s understanding of the feminist message as a
call for comprehensive societal transformation, both men and women are depicted in
Beirut 75 as being victimized by forces either partially or completely beyond their
control, including political corruption, class discrimination, economic exploitation,
destruction of the natural environment, and oppression. (Roberts vi)
Samman in this narrative links the fate of her characters thematically; the feminist message is not
specifically emphasized at the expense of the other social themes explored in the work. The
common theme that brings the fate of her characters together is that of destruction: all five
characters escape Damascus for the supposedly more liberating Beirut; unfortunately the city
which is on the verge of social, economic, and political collapse will only offer them destruction.
While I will be referring in this chapter to the experiences the other characters in the novel go
through in Beirut, mainly the central male character, Farah, I specifically will emphasize the
gendered journey Yasmeena embarks on. On the one hand, Yasmeena‘s experience is interesting
because the social decadence and economic collapse that characterize Beirut at the time are what
actually provide her the space to exercise her individuality and sexuality more freely. On the
41
other hand, the decadence and economic collapse of the city unleashes the violence and tragedy
that takes place at the end of the novel. This violence leaves Yasmeena, and even Farah, victims
of the economic and social collapse that actually will re-empower the patriarchal structure and
social restrictions that will continue to impact women‘s lives in Lebanon during that time.
Just like other Arab woman, specifically Lebanese writers of the 1970s, such as, Hanan
Al-Shaykh, Layla Baalbaki, Etel Adnan, Huda Barakat, Samman wrote on gender issues which
reflect a ―greater awareness of and commitment to the political, social, and sexual issues facing
Arab women‖ (Accad 98). These writings demonstrated a commitment to issues related to the
economic power structures, class discrimination, social limitations, and feminist concerns. Accad
divides writings by modern and contemporary Arab woman writers into four categories, which
developed in four chronological stages, starting from the mid-1940s onwards. These writings
generally display the different phases of feminist consciousness and social commitment in the
Arab world:
The first section deals with the North African women writers from the mid ‘40s to the
mid ‘50‘s, and the problems of biculturality and the search for identity. The second
explores the relationship between romanticism, traditionalism and rebellion in Arab
women writers from the mid ‘50s to the mid ‘60s. The third examines trends toward a
more universalized, socially conscious political commitment in the works of Arab women
writers published between the mid ‘60s and the mid ‘70s. The fourth section assesses the
more recent feminist writings by Arab women writers from the mid ‘70s to the present.
(97)
Accad‘s research asserts that Arab woman writers starting from the mid-1940s addressed
feminist issues as they directly relate to their own historical, cultural, and social contexts,
specifying the experience of the North African women writers. Even though there are specifics
of concern to these writers that relate directly to the experience of being women in their own
countries, the evolution of the feminist issues and their relation to the social context that they
42
have addressed have been closely related, as the majority of their countries went through periods
of colonization, postcolonization, liberation from foreign intervention and rule (both politically
and culturally), and nationalization. In the second phase Accad specifies, Arab woman writers of
the 1950‘s addressed existential problems of establishing a selfhood freed from the anxiety of
patriarchy. In this case, woman writers were concerned with issues pertaining to the search for a
cohesive, autonomous self and individuality, and those of this period were concerned basically
with portraying ―their female characters‘ private struggles for personal identity, seen
alternatively as a search for personhood or as an escape from ‗thinghood‘‖ (96). Writers who
wrote during this time period include Syrian writer, Colette Khuri, and Lebanese writer Layla
Ba‘albaki. Khuri‘s first acclaimed novel published in 1959, Ayyam Ma’ah (Days With Him)
addresses the struggles of the protagonist, Reem, who goes through a series of what is seen as
revolutionary feminist acts during her time period, pursues her education, gets a career at a
governmental department, and decides to engage in a romantic relationship with, Ziyad, the man
she loves, despite the disapproval of her uncle. However, when Ziyad asks her to leave her career
for marriage, Reem refuses, reclaiming an agency that establishes her as an independent women
(Altoma 79). Likewise, Ba‘albaki‘s 1958 novel, Ana Ahya ( I Am Alive), focuses on the plight
and frustrations of the protagonist, Lina, whom tries to establish herself as a financially
independent woman while balancing her desires to be socially independent from her family
(Badran and cooke xxxi). Both novels are examples on the early engagement of Arab women
writers in social critique and the struggle for financial independence of the Arab woman.
This type of writing by Arab women writers is quite different from the writings of many
of their contemporary malecounterparts; there is slightly similar emphasis on a selfhood not
connected to any ―foreign‖ entity, yet many Arab male writers tend to depict a sustainable
43
patriarchal social structure. Hafez asserts that from the mid-1950s until the early 1960s, the time
Accad emphasizes, male writers depicted selfhood as intrinsically patriarchal, clinging to
upholding a traditional and national ethos of the male authority. Also, female characters in such
narratives written by men were portrayed as beautiful girls who uphold tradition, patriarchy, and
male authority, a portrayal that quite reflected dominant discourses of the nation at the period of
time (94).According to Hafez, Arab male writers of this time period did not display any
particular sensitivity toward feminist concerns, since they were mostly concerned with
establishing a national self, which they saw as an important step toward achieving total
autonomy from any foreign ―other‖ (93).
Generally, female characters in the male writings of this period filled the role of
―daughter, wife, and mother, and [were] successfully subservient to their fathers, husbands, and
sons‖ (96). In women‘s literature of this time period, women characters tended to be committed
to resistance against patriarchy, yet they connected a sense of social and political commitment
toward a feminist cause to a wider political context. The majority of Arab countries in the late
1960‘s became involved in a pan-Arab struggle supporting the Palestinian struggle against Israel,
where women were in the forefront, fighting side-by-side with men in order to weaken the
foreign domination and be part of their country‘s national identity. At this time, women writers,
including Samman in her early writings, started displaying a commitment to the feminist cause,
yet they would merge it with the wider commitment to the nation. For example, Egyptian writer,
Latifa al-Zayyat, demonstrates this mode of writing in her 1960 novel, The Open Door. The
novel‘s protagonist,Layla, has a growing political awareness and engagement which is linked to
her incipient feminism. In the novel, Al-Zayyat connects nationalism and feminism, proposing a
type of literature with political commitment and feminist aspirations (Amireh 1).
44
Accad then describes the mid-1970s as a third stage of women‘s writing, where even
though women were committed to a wider political, national, and social struggle alongside their
commitment to a feminist cause, they became ―disillusioned‖ ―with the realization that political
movements used women, instead of working for their liberation‖ (Accad 96). Also, Jabouri and
Ashour argue that Arabic literature produced by women in the 1970s entered an ―age of doubt,‖
wherein Arab women novelists wrote about ―war, frustration, the erosion of all perceptions and a
reality even stranger than fiction‖ (9). Women of this time wrote about unsolved feminist
problems and connected them to a wider political and social structure that was on the verge of
plunging into political and sectarian divisions that were to cause great destruction in some
countries, especially Lebanon. Among Lebanese women writers of this period are those whom
wrote prior to and after the ensuing of the civil war, such as, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Etel Adnan, and
Ghada Samman. The thematic concerns of these writers shifted from being feminist oriented
toward portraying the civil war through the female experience. This group of women writers
called ―Beirut Decentrists‖ is writers who ―have shared Beirut as their home and the war as their
experience‖ (cooke 3). The importance of this type of writing is that women writers articulate the
complex experience of war through a female voice, inscribing a unique feminist position.xxiii
Samman wrote Beirut 75 during the first half of the 1970s, the time, according to Accad,
when woman writers were frustrated and disillusioned by the neglect of the feminist cause, while
prioritizing political conflict and struggle. However, Samman, who by this time period had been
championing women‘s social, sexual, and economic liberation for a decade, strongly connected
these freedoms with a wider Arab cause; that is the liberation of men and women in Arab
countries from economic and political suppression that plagued Arab societies collectively
(Nabulsi 59). It is important to note that while Samman‘s central female protagonist, Yasmeena,
45
does display this general mode of feminist frustration and defeat throughout the novel, this
condition is mainly connected to her inability to liberate herself from poverty and financial
struggle that continue to plague her life even in Beirut. She escapes ―thinghood‖ by being under
the guardianship of her mother and the convent she works at as a teacher, not only because she
seeks sexual and emotional liberation, but rather because she connects her thinghood to
economic dependency. Once in Beirut, she exercises her newly acquired individual freedom
with a sense of rebellion, specifically against the years of sexual suppression she had
experienced earlier in her life, and a sense of financial gain, since she starts making money
through her sexual freedom. Her relationship with Nimr, a wealthy Lebanese businessman,
brings her sexual fulfillment for the first time in her life, as well as riches, as Nimr showers her
with money and expensive gifts she had never dreamt of acquiring while in Damascus. In return
for accepting her relationship with Nimr, Yasmeena‘s brother also gains financially, since he
demands a constant flow of money from her in return to ―granting‖ her some individual freedom.
In the novel, Yasmeena‘s sexual suppression and liberation are directly linked to her economic
situation, where she departs from Damascus to Beirut in hopes of changing her economic reality,
and in retrospect, gaining sexual liberation.
Samman, an advocate of a sexual revolution, continues to present it within its Arab
cultural context, where she believes that revolutions against injustices on all fronts in Arab
countries are interconnected. In an interview, Samman describes how the sexual revolution is
related to different kinds of revolutions taking place in Arab societies, including a political and
economic revolution:
It is not a secret that I have come to believe that the sexual revolution is an inseparable
part of the Arab individual‘s revolution to snatch the rest of his freedoms [...] economical,
political and the freedom of speech of writing and thinking. There is no other salvation
46
save the struggle against all our various concepts including our sexual concepts and the
struggle against the superficial bourgeois concept of freedom. (Samman qtd. in El-Hage
1)
Samman here defends social, political, and economic causes for women in Arab society, which
will ultimately lead to sexual liberation, issues she connects together in her writings. Also,
Samman connects her work to a context yet larger than the Arab one by addressing universal
existential issues that reflect the human condition:
The concerns laid bare in Beirut 75 are not unique to the experience of modern Arabs, but
in one degree or another are reflective of the ―human condition‖ common to present-day
societies throughout the world as they are forced to rethink previously unquestioned
values and practices and as they search of ways of establishing communal identities
which affirm the dignity of all individuals.‖ (Roberts vii)
While my analysis in the following section is specific to the tragic experience of Yasmeena, and
how Samman connects this specific experience to the fate of the rest of the characters and even
the lives of the Lebanese people at large, the existential dilemma represented is one that reflects
a general universal human condition at the time. Also, even though my focus will be on gender
issues raised in the novel, Samman has addressed them ―to an extent that they impinge on the
condition of society as a whole‖ (Roberts vii). Thus, throughout my analysis, I will continue to
contextualize Yasmeena‘s journey within the temporal and spatial period in which she was
represented, where it is necessary to integrate the individual struggle for indepencency with the
wider social context. Specifically, the 1970s was when Arab woman writers, Samman being one
of the most prominent of the time, connected women‘s issues, and particularly their female
characters‘ struggles for personal identity, to the social, political, and economic conditions in
their societies (Accad 96).
Beirut 75: A Shared Destination and Destiny
47
In Beirut 75, Samman experiments with narrative voice, techniques, and tropes in a way
that makes the journey Yasmeena, Farah, and the other characters make in the cab reflect the
journey and dreams that end in nightmares once these characters settle in Beirut. The narrative is
told mainly in the third person and shifts sometimes to the first person, where we have direct
access to the exact thoughts running in the heads of the characters, especially Yasmeena and
Farah. This shift also makes it possible to blend the past, present, and future of the lives of the
characters; through flashbacks and interior monologues we learn the utmost about them, such as
their past failures in Damascus, their present hopes, and the future they anticipate in Beirut,
supposedly, the land of opportunity. Also, this blending of the past, present, and future reflects a
general sense of the interconnectedness of past and present times and how they continue to affect
each other in the lives of the characters in the narrative. Furthermore, Beirut 75 has twenty-six
chapters, the last twelve of which are nightmares told in the first person by Farah, who at the end
is the only survivor of the five main characters. Through these nightmares we learn about the
unfortunate destiny of each of the five characters, in addition to that of Yasmeena, and how her
dreams of social and economic liberty never see the light.
The controlling trope in the narrative is the journey all five main characters take from
Damascus to Beirut on board a cab. This shared journey trope at the beginning of the novel
offers a microcosm of a slice of society, where all the characters on board are part of the lowermiddle class, or even the lower class, of Damascene society. They all depart to Beirut in hopes of
a better life. Even though the characters are not directly related to one another, this shared
journey trope connects them to a shared destination and destiny that renders each and every one
of them a victim of the decadence, political, and economic collapse Beirut will be experiencing
upon their arrival. This concept of journey in the cab Samman employs as a narrative strategy is
48
meant to transcend the boundaries of the known. Damascus is known, for those boarding the cab,
who move toward the unknown, an unfamiliar setting despite what each character imagines
Beirut to be. The cab in this journey narrative epitomizes movement and mobility, yet in the
negative sense since the journey is fraught with menacing incidents, foreshadowed by three
veiled women dressed in black occupying the back seat of the cab and beginning with a flat tire,
which in turn foreshadows the destruction of the protagonists in Beirut.
Departures and Imagined Arrivals: From Damascus to Beirut
The novel opens in Damascus, as a cab driver stands under the blazing sun trying to
recruit travelers to board his cab bound to Beirut. The description of the Damascene street on
that particular day seems harsh:
The sun blazed fiercely and everything on the Damascus street seemed to pant and
perspire. Even the buildings and sidewalks seemed to tremble feverishly, shuddering
amidst the hot vapors which rose steadily from everything in sight. The sounds of the city
too seemed sunscorched, suffocating. (Samman 3)
From the start, this imagery of a cruel city foreshadows the central trope that controls the
narrative of the novel: Damascus is not an inviting place to live in; rather, it is a place one
suffocates in. In order to survive, one should escape it. The destination is directly stated by the
cab driver: ―‗Beirut! Beirut!‘ he sang out the name as if he were introducing a dancer to the
audience at a cabaret‖ (3). This conflict between the cruel imagery of Damascus and the singing
voice of the cab driver presents the central paradox controlling the mind of the main characters in
the novel: the oppressive nature of Damascus and the liberal nature of Beirut. Through the tone
connected to the mention of both places, it seems that Samman is legitimizing the need to escape
which the passengers leaving Damascus feel.
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In addition, we are introduced to Farah and Yasmeena, the two protagonists, who cannot
wait to depart from Damascus to Beirut once and for all. Farah, whose body ―shudders at the
name Beirut‖ and who ―can hardly wait a minute longer‖ to depart from Damascus, is very
excited to see Yasmeena, a possible passenger approaching:
An attractive young woman then approached, being seen off by her mother. The latter
was veiled, her neediness betrayed by the clothes she wore. Her daughter wore a short
dress which revealed a pair of exceedingly fair plump legs. Good, another passenger
thought Farah to himself. Three more and we‘re off to ―Beirut,‖ as if it were the body of a
naked woman brushing up against him. (3)
In this scene, the contrast between the mother‘s and daughter‘s attires is a focal point Samman
purposefully emphasizes to stress the difference between Damascus and Beirut. The mother is
dressed in a veil, a significant garment that could reflect many aspects of one‘s subjectivity,
among them religiosity, traditionalism, social and economic class. In contrast, Yasmeena is
wearing a short dress that contrasts with the modesty, religion, and/or tradition the mother‘s
dress implies. Also, the mother, who is part of an older generation, veiled and modestly dressed,
remaining in Damascus, and the daughter, part of a younger generation, dressed in revealing
attire, leaving to Beirut, reflect the stark contrast of what the two places represent and offer to
both characters. As he examines Yasmeena‘s dress and wonders why she could be possibly
escaping Damascus to Beirut, Farah remarks, ―Perhaps she shops for all her clothes from Beirut
like most of the bourgeois women of Damascus do. On the other hand, her mother looked quite
poor. Who knows? She might be on a search for glory, like me‖ (6). Farah‘s observation also
reflects in a sense that Beirut, at the time, was seen not only as a place for independence,
freedom, and liberation, but also as a hub for the latest fashion, where upper middle class and
upper class Damascene ladies shopped. Most importantly, for Farah to bring up economics and
social class when trying to define Yasmeena is focal, becausewe will learn upon the unfolding of
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the narrative that she is actually escaping economic entrapment in Damascus in hopes of
achieving economic freedom in Beirut.
Yasmeena considers Damascus not only a traditional restrictive environment that she is
―all the more eager to get away‖ from (4) In some ways, Damascus also represents familial
authority from which she wants to detach herself. As her mother sees her off with teary eyes,
Yasmeena cannot wait to get away: ―Her mother‘s teary-eyed farewell seemed only to have
aroused her irritation, and she cast impatient glances at the driver, hoping to prod him to get
them on their way‖ (4). For Yasmeena, Damascus represents confinement in a society that
offers her opportunity neither to thrive or succeed, nor to enjoy any type of individual freedom:
She thought to herself, I‘m tired of working as a teacher in the convent schools. I‘m tired,
weary, fed up. […] The days crawl by, as sluggish as an anesthetized body on an
operating room table, while I do nothing but teach, write poetry, and suffer discontent
and anxiety. Beirut is waiting for me with all her glitter, with all the possibilities of
freedom, love, and fame that she holds out, and the opportunity to publish my poems in
her newspapers. My heart feels like a bird hungry to fly. I‘ll never look at another nun.
Ugh. (12)
This summarizes and highlights the multifaceted constraints that Yasmeena has experienced in
Damascus: she defines her lifestyle and experiences in terms of lack, as opposed to the multitude
of freedoms she looks forward to in Beirut. The ostensible relationship between Yasmeena and
Damascus is one of constricted space and restricted movement: the days pass slowly and heavily,
reflecting her inner sense of suspension in time. Damascus, epitomized by living with her mother
and working at the convent, is for Yasmeena a cage that limits her freedoms. As we learn
throughout the narrative, one of the primary freedoms she seeks to attain is sexual liberty. Thus
she must leave for Beirut.
Like Yasmeena, Farah flees Damascus, specifically Douma, a rural province connected to
Damascus, in hopes of being liberated from living with his authoritative father and mother. His
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life in Douma is defined by lack as well. Even his closet, the only valuable thing he owns back in
his family house, has in it ―nothing worth being concerned about,‖ yet he always had been
concerned about his family having access to it if he were to forget to lock it when he left the
house. His locked closet has been the only possession to provide him with a sense of ownership
and privacy, detached from the rest of his family. This lack of ownership Farah has always felt
can explain why, as he is boarding the cab, he obsesses over the recommendation letter in his
pocket written by his father to his relative, Nishan, who might offer him a job and set him on the
path to glory as a singer. Thus, for Farah, this letter becomes the only thing he owns; it serves as
an exit visa from Damascus and into Beirut.
Just like Farah and Yasmeena, the other three central characters depart from Damascus to
Beirut with a sense of escaping from both oppressive traditions and deprivation. Ta‘aan is
escaping a family blood feud, and Abu ‗l-Malla and Abu Mustafa are escaping poverty and lack.
All three characters hinge their hopes on the idea of a better and peaceful life in Beirut. The mere
assumption that Beirut offers salvation to those who escape to it is grounded in the binary way
these characters, along with Yasmeena and Farah, view Beirut as opposed to Damascus.
Damascus has not offered these characters any sense of fulfillment or any resolution to the
problems they have been facing. Thus, Beirut becomes the imagined destination to liberation and
freedom from the elements they lack in Damascus.
As the cab is departing Damascus, Yasmeena reads etched on a huge boulder at the
entrance of the city the words, ―remember me always!‖ Perhaps the name of that person‘s
sweetheart was Damascus, thought Yasmeena. But she will forget…‖ (5). Yasmeena‘s
interpretation of those words as addressed by a lover to a beloved named Damascus can be read
as a psychological reflection of how Yasmeena already is determined to leave Damascus for
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good. Implied is that Damascus will forever be defined by Yasmeena and Farah in terms of the
lack that stands in the way of them fulfilling their individual grand dreams of freedom and fame.
The already-established social order and structure that governs their lifestyle in Damascus and
Douma is one that has run deep in their society for generations, and the only means of pursuing
their personal dreams is to leave for the city of opportunity, Beirut.
―Travelling, […], is undertaken to restore something that is lacking; because of this, it
often acquires a fetishistic structure‖ (Curtis and Pajaczkowska, 204). Thus, Beirut becomes
fetishized by Yasmeena and Farah as a destination that will fill what they sense they lack in their
existence in Damascus.
The idea that Beirut is a destination that offers progress, individual liberty, and freedom
was not unique to the time in which Samman wrote. According to Samira Aghacy,
Whether it was created before 1967 or after, the fiction written by women focuses on the
city as an actual place and as a symbol. The city speaks of the woman‘s private and
public life, of her confinement in patriarchal models of experience, and of her struggle to
win freedom from such constraints. The city is an arena in which women seek individual
freedom […]. (504)
Lebanese woman writers of the last four decades have represented Beirut as a ―symbol of wellbeing, independence, and freedom from shackles‖ (507). More specifically, the city has been
represented in such literature as a liberating destination for the female protagonists, where they
are offered ―the opportunity to escape the narrow confines of home, family, and stifling
traditions that have relegated them to a corner and associated them with the nostalgic past.‖
(503). In this light, Beirut is seen as a place ―where women attempt to keep the ever-haunting
past at bay and reveal a thirst for change and for experience and knowledge that they try to
replenish in the city‖ (503). Beirut becomes an embodiment of all the opportunities and freedoms
53
these female protagonists seek to obtain. It also becomes a place to achieve liberating
experiences that they have missed out on prior to living in or relocating to Beirut.
Samman‘s characters, both male and female, actually view Beirut in the same vein
Aghacy describes. As they are in the cab traveling, the characters think about their personal
struggles back in Damascus and how Beirut will liberate them from the lives they have been
carrying out.
However, Aghacy notes that even though the city is a place that offers individuality,
liberty and freedom, it ―incorporates and embraces both the traditional and modern patterns‖ of
society:
The city is a challenging environment because it promises liberation from domestic
routines and the freedom to explore oneself in private as well as public forms of
experience. Being the domain of anonymity, freedom, nonconformity, and individualism,
the city in many texts written by women does not conform to the definition of the past.
Nevertheless, living in an urban setting remains problematic, because self-realization is
difficult in a world where the past continues to intrude and prevail. (506)
In Beirut 75, the characters imagine and dream of reaching a Beirut that will totally liberate them
from the older social structures and the past, and deliver them to a life of freedom. Just like any
destination one escapes to, Beirut becomes an imaginary construction that offers up the hope and
possibility of a better—or at least a different—place in which a new home and identity can be
forged (Robertson, Mash, et al. 4).
Is Beirut really a place that will compensate for the lack the characters have experienced
in Damascus? It becomes clear that Samman intends to complicate this representation by
presenting her characters‘ imaginings and dreams about Beirut prior to actually experiencing it.
Their predictions about Beirut reflect how they actually were only charmed by the idea of
54
freedom and liberty, as opposed to the oppression they have experienced in the past: they each
see a personalized Beirut: ―Instead of one Beirut, there were five‖ (10). However, the city of
their destination is in fact a ―challenging environment‖ (506), where their past will not be totally
disconnected from either their present or their future.
When the cab starts going further away from Damascus and the actual spatial journey
toward Beirut begins, they each become excited, as it seems that their dreams are about to
materialize. Once Yasmeena gains sight of the outskirts of Beirut for the first time, she feels that
her dreams of freedom are coming true; she imagines herself becoming ―free as a butterfly‖ in
Beirut (10).
Farah also, glancing toward the city before reaching it, becomes ―enchanted‖ by the
lights on the peaks of its hills. It is very important to note that the choice of ―enchanted‖ hints
that Farah‘s excitement could be the result of his being deceived (10). Beirut, as a city, has not
promised to give them what these characters lacked in Damascus; however, it becomes a fetish
that embodies all that Damascus lacks in their imagination. Not only that, the mere traveling
from Damascus to Beirut becomes ―a fetishizing activity, journeying as disavowal of … the
present […]‖ (Pollock 72).Yasmeena and Farah are fixated on the idea that traveling to Beirut
will provide them with what their present in Damascus has not. Whether deliberately or not, the
sense of escape these characters display deceives them into being charmed by a destination that
is, perhaps, inviting, yet has not proven itself able to fulfill their expectations.
It is the illusion of a liberating Beirut that drives Yasmeena and Farah to choose it as their
destination, while not being able to predict that Beirut, despite the liberating experiences it will
55
offer them, is a place that will prove to be a prison for them and the other characters who move
to it.
[…] Beirut. The name alone causes these poor unknowns to shiver with excitement at the
promise of freedom and secular pleasures. But these pleasures, Samman graphically
illustrates, are false lures in a city which has adopted only the trappings of modernization,
but which is still riven by blood feuds, class exploitation, and an unyielding patriarchy.
(1)
Thus, from the beginning of the journey, the disparity between the illusions of Beirut, already
constructed in Yasmeena‘s and Farah‘s heads, and the real Beirut that they both have yet to
experience, is one highlighted during the cab journey in several scenes where the destructive
element of the city of their destination is foreshadowed. One of the first foreshadowings is when
three women dressed and veiled in black take the back seat of the cab, sobbing and weeping.
Yasmeena, who has been preoccupied with her hopeful dreams of reaching liberating Beirut,
thinks perhaps ―some relative of theirs has died in Beirut, and they‘re going to his funeral‖
(Samman 5). Farah, on the other hand, who has become pensive and worried about how his life
will unfold in Beirut thinks, ―Why do they sob so? Do you suppose I‘m headed to my death,
while these are the soothsayers of fate lamenting my departure as they escort me to my grave?‖
(5). This symbolic scene seems to predict the impending doom that will hover around every
action Yasmeena and Farah undertake during their time in Beirut.
Another foreshadowing is when the cab is nearing Beirut and the festal fires of the Feast
of the Cross appear in the passengers‘ view from behind the mountain tops. Yasmeena and Farah
react differently to the scene:
Farah thought suddenly, it‘s as if I were attending a festival in which a human sacrifice
were about to be offered to some evil deity. And who shall it be? –me? Yasmeena said in
delight, ―It‘s the Feast of the Cross! How beautiful it all is!‖ (8)
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It seems that Yasmeena‘s determination to reach the destination of her dreams charms her into
interpreting any incident that takes place on the way as a sign of blessing for her imagined grand
entrance. Farah, though excited about the abundance of opportunity Beirut can offer him, starts
fearing the unknown destiny awaiting him. This overwhelming feeling pushes him toward
interpreting the disruptive incidents during the journey as warning signs of an impending doom.
Farah, who proves over and again throughout the novel that he has a realistic outlook toward the
journey he embarks on, realizes that moving to a new city, even though liberating, can also end
in failure. This fear continues to make him more pensive about the hidden future than Yasmeena,
who continues to see the future only as a liberating experience yet to unfold. Displaying a
somewhat naïve outlook toward the future and an immature infatuation with Beirut. She never
contemplates the possibility of failure in this city of opportunity.
Furthermore, it is not until Farah and Yasmeena first set eye on the city that Farah notices
an image that quintessentially symbolizes the kind of life awaiting him and the other travelers in
Beirut:
In the bright city lights Farah could see their wondrous wares: in nylon sacks filled with
water there swam tiny colored fish which, when the bags were hung high, looked as
though they were swimming in the translucent light. (11)
In this scene, Samman intends to provide an insight into the conditions that will become the
reality of Yasmeena‘s and Farah‘s lives upon their relocation. The trappings of the city will
seduce the characters at first by its fluidity and transparency, yet will trap them and isolate them
from realizing their dreams. Even though Farah admires the sight, it seems that subconsciously it
makes him realize that he will meet his doom at this destination, as will the others. He repeats
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―Dante‘s words inscribed on the gate leading into hell, ‗All ye who enter here, abandon all
hope!‘‖ (11).
This short time, in which Farah‘s attitude toward Beirut switches from hopeful to
pessimistic, reflects Samman‘s embedded views on Beirut, both as a city of redemption and of
entrapment. This double description of the city is part of the reality of Beirut and its
representation in the literature of the time period. Beirut was portrayed as an ambivalent city of
liberation and progress, yet a place where the past continues to disrupt and prevail in the present
and future. Writing about Beirut in 1974 specifically, a year prior to the eruption of the civil war,
Samman‘s novel as a whole foreshadows the destruction and chaos that took place the following
year. Samman is aware that, superficially, Beirut was viewed as a liberating destination that
offered a multitude of opportunities for both male and females, especially those coming from
Damascus, a city much more traditional and conservative during the 1970s. Despite this, just like
any other modern city, and specifically a city on the verge of a civil war, Beirut‘s socio-political
disruption made of the city an unsettling site, where the boundaries between the older order,
represented by tradition and patriarchal authority, and the new order, represented by progress and
individual liberty, continued to interfuse. Even though Beirut 75 presents the Beirut of 1974 as a
destructive place, at least Samman gets to unmask ―the pretensions of the ruling class and the
ruling gender which she holds responsible for its misery‖ (Jensen 1). I agree with this assertion
because it seems that Samman created characters in the specific moment of existential crisis
Beirut was going through, when the socio-political reality was just arching toward a catastrophic
destiny for the city and those living in it.
Furthermore, Yasmeena is deceived, as she does not predict that the liberating city of her
imagination actually will meet her with the very same oppressive past she escaped from in
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Damascus. All that she looks forward to is a life of economic independence, and sexual and
emotional freedom. She also looks forward to becoming the published poet she longs to become.
However, Samman creates her characters, and especially Yasmeena, within a world of
impending doom that evokes the social and political reality of Beirut and the Lebanese society at
large during that time.
Despite women‘s endeavors to conceive the self as an independent entity and to realize
themselves in the city, the pernicious influence of the past can frustrate attempts to
achieve autonomy and freedom. In this context, one could say that the strong impact of
the past on literature before 1975 is more devastating and incapacitating than in the
fiction that appeared after this date. (Aghacy 511)
Yasmeena takes for granted that Beirut is the place of liberation; she is unaware of the socioeconomic and political issues that Beirut suffers and that will affect her life as she relocates. It
seems that Samman, like other woman authors of her time period, was aware of the trappings of
Beirut and attempted to convey these elements of social collapse through Yasmeena, Farah, and
the rest of the characters‘ experiences in the ―fallen city‖ of Beirut (al-Hage 1). In the narrative
of Beirut 75, Samman registers the fear and anxiety she felt about a Beirut turning out to be a
restrictive rather than liberating space for both her female and male characters during the time in
which she wrote.
Arriving Without Arrivals: Beirut—Where the Journey Begins and Ends
Right after arriving in Beirut for the first time, Yasmeena is introduced to her emotional
and sexual subjectivity. Beirut becomes a place of ―redemption and a space to be made over‖
when Yasmeena thinks she can launch her career as a successful teacher and a published poet
(Robertson, Mash, et al. 3). Beirut does actually offer her the freedom she seek.
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Until she departs Damascus for Beirut, Yasmeena has experienced no sexually fulfilling
experience. Conversely, she views her body as a site of shame that should be covered, even in
the presence of nobody but her own self: Sunbathing nude on a yacht off the coast of Beirut,
Yasmeena thinks, ―This is the first time I‘ve ever gotten completely undressed anywhere but in
the bathroom. And when I put my clothes back on, I was always safely hidden by the thick steam
and the dim light‖ (12). Yasmeena‘s reservation over her body while in Damascus had been
influenced by the conservative societal attitudes she had been brought up with. Despite these
social restrictions, she does engage in sexual experimentation: she meets a man in his apartment,
where they ―closed all the windows, drew all the curtains, turned out all the lights, and locked
all the doors‖ (12). However, even this confined, locked space did not put off Yasmeena‘s fear,
of being discovered by her mother specifically.
Even then I could hear voices oozing out of the darkness and bouncing off the walls,
warning of the ―iniquity‖ which was about to take place. Mingling with the cries of my
mother, the voice seemed to be coming out of my own body, as if I were possessed by
them. Their words were like scorpions covering my body, stinging me mercilessly. Their
injunctions were like maggots scurrying over me in the darkness, consuming my body
and extinguishing my passions. When he touched me, the voices rang out in a chorus of
alarm. Perhaps he heard them, too. He was unable to possess me, and I fled from his
house. I never saw him again, nor did I repeat the experience. (12)
Yasmeena‘s fear of the brutal negativity she would have received from her mother and her social
circle, and the guilt it produced, had restricted her from freely acting upon her sexuality in
Damascus, as symbolized by the imagery of her body being stung mercilessly by scorpions. As
long as she were in Damascus, she would never be able to free herself form the negative voices
of her mother toward her sexuality. Thus it had become imperative that she depart from
Damascus.
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Once in Beirut, ―[t]he snows of her twenty-seven years were melting at last, the snow
which had descended upon her during her ten long years of nuns‘ habits and teaching in the
convent school‖ (13). In her twenty-seven years in Damascus, her emotions and sexuality had
been frozen, but she experiences her sexuality freely for the first time in Beirut, totally free from
any familial judgment and attitudes that might cause her the anxiety, fear, and guilt she
experienced in Damascus.
Not only does she move away from the boundaries imposed by society, she is able to
transcend any sense of guilt.
Her body was awakened by the sun, by his touch, by the lapping of the waves, the scent
of salt, the swaying of the yacht on the surface of the water, and the effects of the
whiskey which she‘d never tasted before now. The endless blue sky seemed to overflow
with tranquility and goodwill, as if it were granting its blessings to the moments in which
she had first discovered her body, and the sun. What a thrilling, wild feeling had come
over her when, for the first time in her life, she lay naked beneath the sun‘s rays. (12)
―Abroad is often conceived as a place where simple self-gratification is not only possible but
also constituted as a way of life‖ (204). Beirut allows Yasmeena to enjoy the endless sensual
pleasures of her bodily freedom. Not only that, Nimr‘s body stirs Yasmeena‘s eroticism in ways
she has never experienced before. While gratifying herself sensually and sexually with Nimr,
Yasmeena ―liked to think of them as reliving the original creation myth‖ (Samman 13). It is in
this environment of excessive pleasure that Yasmeena determines the way of life she wants to
carry out in Beirut forever, shaping her sexual subjectivity by the leisure and freedom that
accompanies it.
The yacht, where Yasmeena experiences bodily sensuality and sexuality, is situated in
Lebanon, thus further reinforcing that traveling away from Damascus provides her with a life of
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gratification and leisure. She becomes aware that without indulging the joys of her body, she
would remain ignorant of what gives her life meaning. She discovers that fulfilling her sexual
desires is a step toward her realization of a new self to replace the one defined for so long by
lack.
She could no longer imagine how she‘d allowed her body to move about like an
automaton all these years without ever coming to see what a wonder it was. She‘d only
had short-lived, passing adventures in which her body had refused to fully participate.
How could she have carried her body about all those years as a burden, a corpse, a mere
means of transportation, or a tool to carry chalk with? Now she was discovering it for the
first time as a world unto itself, full of delight and pleasures. If she hadn‘t come to Beirut,
she would have remained ignorant all her life of how she was really capable of
functioning, how she could tremble with desire and dance madly to the rhythm of a man‘s
caress. (13)
After being introduced to the sexual delights and pleasures she lacked for so long in her life,
Yasmeena realizes that such pleasures are what give her a zest for life that she never felt while in
Damascus. However, this sexual experimentation becomes fetishizing, and she starts viewing her
sexuality and sexual pleasures as the only dimension that defines her newly acquired subjectivity
and freedom. ―She was still sipping whiskey and roaming naked over the deck of the yacht. She
enjoyed taking off her clothes and moving about the cabin and the rest of the boat in a state of
nakedness. It filled her with a delicious sense of freedom‖ (38). She realizes the power of
reclaiming her sexuality, which is the equivalent of freedom, self-realization, and understanding
what defines her, and thus claiming a self. Prior to enjoying a full, healthy sexual experience
Yasmeena views herself as a ―corpse,‖ whereas after enjoying the pleasures of the body she
understands how ―she is capable of functioning‖ (14). Having made a fetish of her sexuality, she
begins to define completeness and wholeness in terms of that sexuality. Yasmeena thus depends
on sex and becomes fixated on it as a means to recover both agency and subjectivity.
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After enjoying the pleasures of her body and sexuality, Yasmeena resolves that the only
way to reclaim her body from the sexual deprivation for years is to plunge herself further into
this newly acquired delight. Her sexual experience liberates her from the limitations that had
confined her body for so long, and she fully immerses herself in Nimr‘s body, to which she is
addicted:
But ah, what his body could do to her! His body perfumed with expensive suntan oil and
with the softness of a life of ease and luxury. She thought, nothing in the world can
compare with the intoxicating sweetness of being joined to a beloved man, beneath the
sun, in broad daylight, on the high seas where no sound can be heard but that of the
lapping of the waves. At such moments her heart was transformed from a monotonously
ticking clock into a drum being beaten with wild abandon as naked dancers twirled madly
about in a tropical rain forest. (14)
In this scene, Yasmeena responds to the pleasures Nimr‘s body offers her in a way that could be
interpreted as not only an attempt to reclaim agency and sexual subjectivity, but an attempt to
objectify the male body for her mere pleasure. In this way, Yasmeena comes, perhaps
momentarily, to a position of power, where she actively sees Nimr as her sex object. However,
when Yasmeena objectifies Nimr‘s body, her purpose is not to exercise any type of power over
him but rather satisfy her sexual hunger and undo her deprivation: ―I love what his naked body
can do to me. […] I‘ve become an addict, and his body is my opium‖ (39). This sense of
addiction to Nimr‘s body signals how such a fixation is a signal of weakness rather than a means
of empowerment.
In addition, sexual delight and pleasure for Yasmeena are not separable from economic
luxury and freedom. In Damascus Yasmeena had been deprived of a luxurious life due to her
social class, just as she had been deprived of the pleasures of her sexuality. Nimr‘s socioeconomic status becomes as attractive to her as his body; both offer her the same level of
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satisfaction. ―She loved his wealth as much as she despised her poverty. She loved the brashness
and insolence with which his miraculously constituted frame broadcast his privileged status in
the world. […] ‗He was born with a checkbook in his mouth. I was born with an overdue bill in
mine‘‖ (14). As we will learn later, Nimr‘s riches and social status become a precondition for her
continued exercise of her freedom because they both offer her free mobility in the city,
independent of patriarchal authority, represented by her brother, who lives in Beirut.
When Yasmeena moves to Beirut, she carries her brother‘s address with her in order to
seek him and perhaps live with him for a certain period of time until she acquires a job.
However, from the start, she is introduced to Nimr and starts living with him. Her brother, who is
supposed to be responsible for supporting her financially until she finds a job as a teacher or a
poet, does not object to her having a relationship with Nimr, as Yasmeena regularly visits him
and provides him with part of the money Nimr gives her.What is interesting about the brother‘s
initial response to knowing his sister is Nimr‘s mistress is that he does not seem to be affected by
the traditional idea that he is a guardian and a protector of his sister‘s honor, which traditionally
has been defined through controlling his sister‘s sexuality. As long as there is financial benefit
for him in store, he does not assume the authoritative role. Greed is his basic drive. From this, we
learn that Yasmeena‘s relationship with Nimr is of double benefit to her, offering both pleasure
and freedom from her brother‘s control.
A crucial turning point in Yasmeena‘s journey toward economic and self satisfaction is
when she realizes that fulfilling her sexual desires is not sufficient to enable her to go on feeling
like a fully ―functioning‖ being (42). After enjoying sexual fulfillment, she starts experiencing
emotional attachment to Nimr, emotional attachment that she recalls never feeling back home in
Damascus. Since Beirut has compensated her for her previous lack of sexual pleasure and
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provided her with a complete healthy sexual experience, she moves further toward filling her
emotional lack with love. However, Nimr does not reciprocate those feelings. He is able to offer
her his body and his money, but he is not ready to offer his emotions, since he does not view
emotions in the same light she does.
When Nimr neglects Yasmeena emotionally, she looks for other means to fill this void.
She realizes that she has made a mistake by neglecting her writing and pretty much everything
else she had desired to achieve in Beirut, settling instead for sex and money. She has not acted
upon the free space and mobility Beirut offered her, thus committing one of the most atrocious
mistakes in her life: arresting her agency. So she decides to go back to writing.
She decided to seek refuge in her papers and write a poem as she‘d always done before
when she was sad. But she was unable to. She‘d even forgot about the desire she once
had to meet with literary critics, reporters, and publishers. She‘d forgotten everything.
Nimr had become her entire universe, the ground beneath her feet, and now he was
withdrawing and leaving her to fall alone through space. (43)
However, it is too late for Yasmeena to pull herself out of her emotional fixation on Nimr. His
body has become her ―opium‖ and his money the only means of liberation from her brother. As
he starts pulling away from her, neglecting her at home and never taking her out to introduce her
to his social circle, she starts obsessing more over her attachment to him. Eventually, she
conditions her well-being, and pretty much her whole existence, on the presence of Nimr in her
life: nothing else seems to matter beyond his presence.
Yasmeena can no longer distinguish between her emotional connection to Nimr and her
sexual addiction to his body. The sense of deprivation seems to be what drives her obsessive
attitude. This very deprivation is one that Yasmeena, and certainly Samman, connect to the
deprivation Arab women suffered for centuries, due to an over-controlling older, traditional,
patriarchal authority that governed women‘s sexuality:
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[H]is body… I‘d become accustomed to it, addicted to it. […]. For all of twenty-seven
years I‘d been forbidden to partake of this amazing pleasure, and here I was now, ill on
account of it, a deviant who had devoted herself to bed. In my blood ran the passionate
desires of all the Arab women who had been held prisoner for more than a thousand of
years. It was no longer possible for me to experience sex as merely one part of my life.
Instead, I‘d been vanquished in my encounter with it, and it had become my entire
existence. (41)
Just like the other Arab women whom she connects herself with, Yasmeena sees that they all
have been held prisoners for years, since their sexual freedom was regulated and controlled by
authoritarian men in their lives. From this, we come to understand that Samman intends for
Yasmeena to represent the sexual and emotional deprivation all Arab women have suffered, and
Yasmeena‘s over-obsession with the male body and the desires it arouses in her should be
viewed in that specific context: ―It isn‘t because I‘m a whore, but simply because my hunger for
his body is more than a thousand years old‖ (42). Also, on an individual level, Yasmeena starts
wondering whether the sexual deprivation she experienced in Damascus is the very reason for
her fixation on what she had lacked: ―She wondered to herself, if I‘d known another man before
Nimr—if they had allowed my body to experience wholesome, sound relationships in
Damascus—would I have lost my way to this extent?‖ (95). At this moment of her experience,
Yasmeena continues to blame her past for constantly plunging itself forcefully into her present,
thus preventing her from evolving into a fully autonomous person, keeping her confined within
the social parameters of tradition she was born into: ―When the purveyors of tradition confined
me within a female‘s ‗proper‘ role, as a genie is held captive inside its bottle, they forgot that in
doing so, they were stripping me of my powers of resistance‖ (42).
While Yasmeena reconciles her sexual feelings with her emotions toward Nimr, Nimr
does not view his relationship with her as going beyond sexual gratification. During Nimr‘s
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monologue, when he reaches the resolution of ending his relationship with Yasmeena, he reflects
on his attitude toward love and her:
It is impossible for me, Nimr Faris Sakeeni, to love? Me, love a poor girl who‘s ignorant
of social etiquette, has bad taste in clothes, and gave herself to me physically without our
being married? Love, love, love—that‘s all she understands and talks about. For me,
there are sexual relations, in which there‘s nothing wrong with leading a woman on with
the word ―love,‖ and then there is a marital relation, in which the most important thing is
that the marriage be politically and financially expedient for my father and me. (79)
From the start, Nimr‘s only involvement with Yasmeena is sexual. Though he showers her with
money and gifts, he never looks at her as anything but his mistress. Nimr‘s final blow to
Yasmeena is when he abandons her to marry his father‘s political rival‘s daughter. Not only that,
the marriage is a traditional arranged one, where Nimr does not know his fiancée personally prior
to his father asking him to propose to her. Yasmeena, who still has faith in the new, modern, and
liberating social order that governs Beirut, is astonished to learn that ―arranged marriages‖ in the
―peculiar city‖ of Beirut would take place. As Yasmeena becomes disillusioned with Nimr and
even the traditional social structure that governs Beirut, she feels abandoned, by both Beirut and
Nimr, the two objects she had initially looked to for individual freedom, riches, mobility, and
sexual delight.
This double abandonment becomes triple when she returns to her brother‘s apartment
empty handed, with no money from Nimr. Her brother, enraged when he realizes that he will not
be receiving that money anymore, thinks Yasmeena is fooling him by profiting off other sexual
affairs without sharing the profit with him. However, what matters the most to him is that he will
no longer get money from Yasmeena in return for ignoring her affair with Nimr. No longer
willing to accept her promiscuity and enraged, he starts beating her up, calling her ―slut,‖ and
―filthy whore‖ (95). As he starts undermining her for engaging in an extramarital relationship,
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she thinks, ―There‘s no need to start pretending all of a sudden that you‘re interested in
defending your lofty honor!‖ (96). But before she is able to utter those words, her brother attacks
her. ―But her mouth was full of blood, and before she could say a word, the knife sank into her
chest. She didn‘t feel anything but astonishment‖ (96).
Right after the murder, Yasmeena‘s brother surrenders himself at the police station,
confessing that he has killed his sister to restore the family honor she has tarnished: ―In a manly
voice he said, I killed my sister in defense of my honor and I want to make a complete
confession‖ (96). The adverb ―manly‖ was chosen carefully to describe the sense of legitimacy
that surrounds honor crimes. Her brother realizes his sense of entitlement over his sister‘s
sexuality and body, which in a sense is legitimized by a powerful patriarchal social authority.
This is emphasized by the reaction he gets from the officer and clerk at the police station who
hear his story: ―A look of admiration flashed in the officer‘s eyes […].‖ ―The brother then began
making his confession while the clerk wrote it down, in his eyes, also, a look of appreciation and
respect‖ (96). The brother‘s confession is received with admiration from these men who also
believe that a woman defiling her family honor deserves to be put to death by a patriarchal
authority figure.
Yasmeena‘s abandonment by Nimr, her brother, and the city of Beirut represent the
predominance of patriarchal authority and tradition that leads to violence against women.
Though all three things manage for a while to appear to Yasmeena as liberating factors, their
disguise does not endure for long. Nimr, who appears to be the modern, wealthy, open-minded
gentleman, uses her for sex then abandons her. Her brother, who allows her mobility, space, and
social freedom when it profits him, eventually, kills her. Beirut becomes a curse on Yasmeena;
the city and its social structure fall into a state of regression toward an awakening traditional
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patriarchal authority that starts dominating Lebanese society, going through political and
economic collapse. Thus, since the sustainability of the liberties Yasmeena gains were granted
by a Beirut that is losing its own progress, modernization, liberty, and freedom, it becomes
inevitable that Yasmeena loses those very same liberties at the end. Yasmeena‘s relationship
with all three major factors in her life in Lebanon, at the end, turns out to be destructive, as she is
finally obliterated for wanting to exercise the very same liberties they offered her, especially
economic liberty.
Not only does Yasmeena, the only female protagonist in Beirut 75, become a victim of
the collapse of the social and economic stability and thus the reviving patriarchal authority in
Beirut, Farah‘s journey is riddled with a similar type of patriarchal authority that overpowers him
and leads him to madness at the end due to power manipulation exercised upon him. Before
actually experiencing Beirut as a destructive force in his life, Farah has a sense of foreboding as
he sets foot in Beirut:
Cruelty—there was an atmosphere of cruelty that he became aware of whenever he tried
to make a move in this strange city. He was constantly hearing the echoes of a long
drawn-out wail wherever he went. Ever since the night of his arrival, the mysterious
sound of mournful weeping had haunted him. It was as if it had taken up residence in his
soul and refused to be dislodged.‎)32(‎
The state of Beirut that Farah senses as he boards the cab in Damascus continues to haunt him
even as he arrives. Despite looking forward to meeting his rich relative Nishan, the ominous
sense of destruction presents itself in the city itself, which continues to remind Farah of the
possibility of failure.
Just like Yasmeena, Farah escapes to Beirut in hopes of distancing himself from his
father‘s patriarchal grip and in hopes of advancing financially, but little does he know that his
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life will fall under total control of a much more authoritarian figure, Nishan, who offers him a
contract to become the famous singer he always dreamed of becoming.
My father, the tyrannical peasant, seemed to enjoy toying with my destiny. He would
throw the books I was so addicted to into the bonfires that he used to set for burning
weeds. He‘d bellow at me, ―Instead of wasting your life thinking and obsessing, you
ought to be like Nishan!‖ […]. I‘m going to turn you over with my cousin Nishan. He‘ll
pour you into the right mold—a golden one!‖ I myself love gold and riches. After all,
riches mean freedom, time, travel, being able to buy books and records, and not being
subservient to Adil, director of the National Library where I used to work. Money means
beautiful women with soft hands and long, painted fingernails. (17)
However, this gain comes at a very high price, since Nishan assumes domination over Farah‘s
body and life, believing that giving him the opportunity for fame and success entitles him to
such. Nishan, who is not attracted to women sexually, starts treating Farah as his sexual object as
the price for offering him an opportunity at fame and riches:
I was lying on my stomach when he began to massage my back for me, causing the
aroma of the costly suntan oil to diffuse through the air. At first, his fingers moved gently
and delicately back and forth over my skin […]. But then his touch became rough and
violent, like a plow going down into the soil. And then I understood. (69)
While Nishan has marketed Farah to be the ―singer of manliness,‖ attracting a female audience
with his masculinity, Farah starts feeling emasculated after he is treated like a sex object by
Nishan and no longer can have any sort of healthy heterosexual interaction with women: ―He felt
that the door between him and the world of women had been shut forever‖ (67).
This objectification plunges Farah into depression, as he feels a total loss of manhood—
the manhood he actually left Damascus and Douma to restore: ―When Farah heard her address
him by his title, ‗singer of manliness,‘ he nearly burst out laughing and crying at the same time.
It was with this image that Nishan had launched him to stardom: the ‗singer of manliness‘‖ (67).
Farah is no longer able to consolidate the public image Nishan has marketed him to be and the
emasculated one he has actually made of him, where Farah starts touring the streets of Beirut
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dressed in women‘s clothes. Massad comments on Samman‘s treatment of homosexuality and its
relationship to power abuse and to traditional concepts of masculinity, manliness, and femininity:
For Ghada Al-Samman, the Lebanese ruling class was literally a bunch of fuckers
penetrating dreamy-eyed youth, destroying them in the process. If active male
homosexuality in al-Samman‘s novel resulted from […] wealthy decadence, and passive
male homosexuality from ambition to greed, this was because manly masculinity was
nothing less than a masquerade, just as femininity has always been. Al-Samman‘s
depiction is one wherein passive homosexual experiences not only render men impotent
but also impels them to dress the part, wearing women‘s clothing and publicly declaring
their womanly, and therefore, unmanly, essence. As for those who continue to pose as
manly men, her novel sought to remove the veil from them (Nishan, the early Farah,
Yasmeena‘s brother, as well as other male characters) in order to expose their
unmanliness. Indeed, the attempt by Nishan to recreate the ―epoch of manly men‖ was
doomed to failure precisely because he lived in a world where castration dominated.
(321-322
In the novel, Samman portrays the ruling class prevalent in Lebanese society of the time period
as one that subjects those under its authority and power to sexual abuse as a means to expressing
authority over those in weaker subject positions. Massad‘s analysis of the relationship between
male homosexuality and power abuse in the novel leads to the conclusion that Samman connects
male homosexuality in the novel to economic and social decadence of the ruling class and their
power manipulation.xxiv Sexual abuse and exploitation here is represented as only another type of
injustice and exploitation exercised by those in power positions against those under their
authority.
The destructive relationship Farah has with Nishan alienates him further from Beirut and
all the goals he wants to achieve. Farah is overcome by a sense of passivity and voicelessness,
since he is unable to challenge being exploited. This lack of control over his own body and
sexuality leads Farah to excessive drinking, which leads him to hallucinating and finally a
nervous breakdown. As a means of escape from his depressing reality, Farah becomes addicted
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to prescription drugs, which cause his mental capacity to deteriorate. As a result, Nishan sends
Farah to a mental hospital to receive treatment. Farah has a series of nightmares, where it seems
that his condition further deteriorates.
However, at the mental hospital Farah makes the decision of running away from Beirut
back to Damascus in order to restore his sanity: ―I‘m going to run away, back into the arms of
my Mother Earth. I‘ve got to stay hidden without being afraid of my nightmares. I‘ve got to be
careful as I flee because Nishan is determined to get back at me with all the influence of money
at his disposal. He wanted me in the insane hospital not to see me healed, but to take revenge on
me, to torture me‖ (114-115). In Farah‘s view, Nishan, Beirut, and all the people living there are
the insane ones, whom he should distance himself from. ―He‘s the one who‘s ill, though, since
he‘s the one who‘s able to accommodate himself to this sick society. As for me, I‘m healthy.
That‘s why I wasn‘t able to fall into a state of utter, absolute madness‖ (115). Believing that he
has reached mental clarity, he distances himself from the lures of Beirut that had attracted him
while he was in Damascus. He comes to the realization that Beirut is not really the liberating
city, but rather an alienating city of madness. His sense of identity and subjectivity is shattered in
a city that has disoriented him from his dream and even his inner self:
Ah—the day I came to Beirut, I was vaster than the night, and the sea itself wouldn‘t
have been large enough for my bed. It seemed to me that the entire star-pierced canopy of
darkness would be too small to contain my ambition and that all the women of Beirut
wouldn‘t suffice me. […] God, how broken I am, how scattered! And here I am now,
gathering up the pieces of my broken self in a wretched hideout behind a garbage dump.
(115)
Farah‘s lot enables him to fight back while he can, as opposed to that of Yasmeena, whose life is
snatched away before she can discover that the lure of Beirut and its people is false, and perhaps
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make a decision to return to Damascus. However, the way Yasmeena and Farah experience
Beirut is nothing but a reflection of the power and class abuse that takes place in Beirut.
Turning into an escapist once more, Farah realizes that returning to square one will at
least provide him with the safety of his previous life. In the closing lines of the novel, Farah
shows that he considers flight his only means of survival:
When I ran away from the hospital, the first thing I did was to steal the sign at the
entrance that said "Hospital for the Mentally Ill.‖ I took it to the city entrance, removed
the sign saying ―Beirut,‖ and planted the other one in its place. I burst out laughing as I
read the sign saying. ―Hospital for the Mentally Ill,‖ with Beirut looming up behind it in
dawn‘s light like an infernal wild beast preparing to pounce. And I ran away, fleeing to
the safety of my lair […]. (115)
When Farah finally leaves and replaces the Beirut sign with the mental hospital sign, it becomes
apparent that Samman is representing a city that lacks social order. In this powerful scene,
Samman confirms and concludes the earlier imaginative scenes of destruction that overpower
Farah as he is boarding the cab from Damascus to Beirut. It is when Farah decides to return to
the site of his departure that we as readers also realize that the circular journey he is taking will
never end with an arrival at any of the goals and dreams he anticipated achieving by this journey.
Just like Yasmeena, Farah is never able to gain any sense of agency to control the route to
success either in Beirut or back home. This lack of control over their own lives ultimately leads
to an impossibility of arrival at a final destination that affects any positive change in their lives or
achieves their dreams. Ultimately, Beirut for Yasmeena and Farah reveals itself to be a place of
suppression and oppression, where they both become victims of an empowered patriarchal
authority empowered by social decadence and economic exploitiaon.
Ultimately, the way both the male and female protagonists experience Beirut is similar,
as they both experience temporary freedom that comes to an end shortly after their arrival. The
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old economic structure, social structure, and patriarchal authority they have escaped from in
Damascus come to dominate their lives in Beirut. However, the mere addressing of the
suppression of individual liberty and freedom that concerns the lives of both male and female
characters in this narrative is a challenge and a revolutionary step toward criticizing the Arab
socio-economic and political structures of the time that stripped both females and males alike of
their individual freedoms.
The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase: The Centrality of Home While Abroad
The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase xxv is a travelogue, a collection of travel accounts written
by Samman from 1964 to 1976 and published periodically in two Lebanese magazines, Al-Isbu’
al-Arabi and Al-Hawadith (Al Waref 1). The travels Samman undertakes are arranged
chronologically by composition date and reflect her succeeding travels from one county or city to
another. The period of which she writes begins with her very first trip to Europe in pursuit of an
MA, encountering London for the first time, and extends to her visits to various Arab cities,
including Amman and Baghdad, and her eventual decision to settle in Beirut. These travels
include destinations that she visits for numerous purposes besides the academic, including
searching for a job and attempting to find a final destination to settle down in. What
characterizes Samman‘s travelogue is her inability to transcend the dichotomy of home and
aboard and East-West, where she presents home and abroad as clearly defined categorizes, and
―self‖ and ―other‖ as spatially distinct entities despite her claims otherwise. This act of observing
the places she visits while setting home as the place of departure renders Samman‘s travel
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experiences subjective. Thus, for Samman, ―home is a stable place to tell one‘s stories‖ (Clifford
1).
Initially, after her trip to London in pursuit of an MA, Samman was sentenced to prison
for not obtaining permission from the Syrian government to leave the country to Europexxvi, a
law where the Syrian government had restricted those with university degrees to leave without a
governmental permission. According to El-Hage who has written on Samman‘s autobiographical
writings:
...another reason for al-Samman‘s decision not to return to Syria could have been her
problem with the Syrian authorities. She relates that in the summer of 1966, while in
London, her father passed away in Damascus. At the same time, she was sentenced to jail
for three months because she held a university degree and had left the country without
official permission from the authorities. (1)
A couple of months later, the sentence was ―revoked under a general pardon by the Syrian
government‖ (Al Waref 1). As a result, Samman was allowed to return to Syria, yet she chose
not to even while her passport had expired, rendering her a wandering woman with no country
temporarily. It was not long before she managed to obtain a Lebanese passport, gaining
citizenship through marriage, yet the sense of rootlessness she felt after losing her Syrian
citizenship continued to haunt her throughout her trips.
In this section, I will analyze Samman‘s constant sense of alienation from both Arab
socio-political ideologies and the European countries she travels to that also misrepresent the
Arab persona. The more she traveled around European countries, the more the sense of alienation
and estrangement she felt from her own ―self‖ and the ―others‖ she encountered grew. Analyzing
several of her trip narratives, especially those she relates about the trips she undertakes to a
couple of European countries, I argue that she constructs a self that is disillusioned by both the
75
Arab and the Western/European world; this keeps her alienated from any sense of grounded
identification with either. Yet, the painful sense of displacement and exile she feels throughout
her trips away from home at times affects her objective sense of judgment, where she fails to
transcend the dichotomy of home and abroad and the associations she attaches to each location,
culture, and people.
Samman starts her travelogue in an unconventional manner, with two introductions. The
first introduction contemplates the idea of movement and travel and how it affects her own selfperception and her perception of the world around her:
There is nothing better than instability to trigger the intellect, and thus it is hated. I want
to get out of the sight of people and go to a quite place where I can become the master of
my own self. There are many dimensions of my identity that I don‘t understand, and thus
I need some alone time to make sense of them. Mobility and travel get their value from
the fear they initially cause, where parts of our identity get disrupted in order to help us
gain a better sense of who we are. Some people who fear such change are those who hide
behind their desks in isolated offices that shelter them. However, travel is what strips
away that final shelter and exposes one‘s identity. (Samman 5)
In this passage, Samman points out that movement is what triggers her to exercise critical
thinking, which is an unsettling, fearful activity on its own. However, this very unsettling feeling
produced by movement and critical thinking is necessary for her to understand the true essence
of her identity and personality. She basically underscores two modes of movement that create
this unsettling sense of fear: escape and general travel. For Samman, both modes of travel force
us to distance ourselves from everything, including the familiar surroundings of the workplace,
to find ourselves in a place where we totally expose the ―self‖ in an estranged setting, allowing
an unbiased opportunity to self-evaluation. Specifically, this allows her the opportunity to view
the world and her own self anew, which finally leads to an unbiased sense of understanding of
the world and the self. From this point on, her defining tropes of movement and travel are
76
controlled by this initial sense of flight and escape in order to gain the opportunity for a better
understanding of the self.
In the second introduction, Samman moves to addressing the readers of her travelogue,
asking them to assist her in choosing an alternative proper title for her narrative from a list of
titles she provides, among which the very first option sums up the purpose behind her travels: ―I
moved… and I wrote‖ (7). If it were not for Samman‘s departure from her homeland, the readers
she addresses and the subsequent readers of her travelogue would not have had the opportunity
to obtain a copy of the textual narrative, nor would they have had the opportunity to participate,
even if symbolically, in her journeys. This symbolic invitation to choose a fitting alternative title
becomes very important, as she aims at making her readers feel as if they are accompanying her
on the actual geographic journey she embarks on. Both, the metaphor of ―narrative is travel‖
developed by travel theorist Kai Mikkonen based on the metaphor of ―travel as writing‖
developed by travel theorist Michel Butor, are useful to understanding how Samman invites the
readers to participate in her travels by choosing a title for the travelogue; she invites them to take
part in the narrative as a means of participating in her actual travels. Michele Butor explains, ―to
travel, at least in a certain manner, is to write (first of all because to travel is to read), and to
write is to travel‖ (53). Butor‘s analogy between the act of reading, traveling, and writing is what
Samman basically does. When writing her travelogue, she engages her readers in the narrative
process as a means for them to participate in her travels since her goal behind traveling is to
write a travelogue. Conversely, the act of speaking directly to the readers of her travelogue is
significant since through this act, Samman invites the reader to participate not only in the reading
process, but also in the travels themselves. Thus, to read Samman‘s travelogue is to travel with
her on her journey through the various countries she visits and to register her experiences of
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place as if they were the readers‘ own, writing her narrative on her own travels. Also, this second
introduction highlights the main tropes that will continue to highlight both the sense of alienation
and rootlessness and the desire to connect to people and the new cultures she encounters that
motivate her throughout her journey.
Samman dedicates her travelogue to her ―beloved Salman al-akhadar,‖ a Damascene who
changed his name to Sam fourteen years after leaving Damascus (11). In the dedication, Samman
notes that not only did Salman change his Arabic name, but he also left behind the Arab world,
the Arabic language, and his Arab past for good, cutting himself totally off from his Arab
heritage. When talking about Sam, Samman laments the way he has disconnected himself totally
from his Arab identity purposefully, forgetting the language and as a result never being able to
read her travelogue in his forever-lost mother tongue. Sam‘s voluntary uprootedness from his
culture, identity, and language causes her to shed a tear every time she remembers him because
even the most naturalized elements of his Arab identity, which is the language, is lost, and thus
his return becomes an impossible option.
Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature,
the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the
world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their
politics, at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to
other beings. (Thiongo 441)
By purposefully forgetting his Arabic mother tongue, Sam chooses to also disconnect himself
from his Arab identity and thus perceive himself, the world around him, and others in isolation
from his past. All this is painful for Samman, who through writing her travelogue in Arabic
emphasizes the importance of holding on to one‘s original language, identity, and culture.
However, it is very important to keep in mind that throughout her travels, Samman does actually
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experience at times a sense of loss of certain elements of her Arab identity and culture, which
can be a positive thing, since it enables her to view her own culture in a critical manner. It
allows her to de-center home and her own identity when examining them in the light of the other
worlds she comes to encounter.
When Samman leaves her home in Damascus to London in 1966, little does she know
that the consequence will be an everlasting state of exile, rootlessness, and wandering. When she
reaches London, she receives an official letter condemning her for leaving the country without a
governmental permit and thus sentencing her to a three-month imprisonment upon her return.
Out of fear, Samman does not return to Syria to renew her Syrian passport and consequently
loses her Syrian citizenship, becoming stateless in London. During this year, not only does
Samman feel abandoned by her government, she feels cast out by her society and relatives, who
accuse her at times of being a ―fallen woman‖:
I stood truly alone in this fierce world, facing all the forces that were against me. I spent
[those years] between Lebanon and various European countries, working and living like
any young man alone. These years are what formed me. […] During those years, I
confronted others as a foreigner in a foreign land without the protection of family, social
status, or money, and I learned what I hadn‘t known before. […] The hardest lesson I
learned was my final discovery of the superficiality of the bourgeois Damascene society
that used to consider me during those years as good as dead – ‗a fallen woman‘ – whereas
I was in reality a woman starting to live her life and an artist gaining in awareness [of life
around her]. (Samman qtd. in Vinson)
Despite the pain Samman suffers because of the abandonment by her family and society, she
finds herself experiencing a life of independence and growth. However, this forced state of exile
is sudden, and so she finds herself dislocated and displaced in every place she visits and travels
to afterward. This forced state of exile affects Samman‘s perception of the different cultures and
locations she encounters and thus prevents her from connecting with any of them, even until the
very end of her travels. However, not connecting to any of the cultures she encounters becomes
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a positive thing, as Samman is able to examine her ―self‖ and her own Arab identity with the
same sense of detachment she uses when examining the ―Other‖ and the ―other cultures‖ she
encounters during her travels. Samman looks at the various places she visits and the cultures she
encounters sometimes as a detached observer and critic, allowing a multifaceted approach to
viewing those locations and the cultures they integrate. However, it remains important to note
that Samman‘s observations are ones that are filtered through and highly affected by her
subjective lens, where she does demonstrate a narrow outlook to the way she views the other
peoples and cultures she encounters.
In her article, ―Other than myself/my other self,‖ Trinh Minh-ha discusses the way
journey affects the travelers‘ perception of place, both home and abroad, and the way it affects
their perception of their own identity:
Every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries. The travelling self is here,
both the self that moves physically from one place to another, following ―public routes
and beaten tracks‖ within a mapped movement, and a self that embarks on an
undetermined journeying practice, having constantly to negotiate between home and
abroad, native culture and adopted culture, or more creatively speaking, between a here, a
there, and an elsewhere. (Minh-ha 9)
Minh-ha talks about the physical and metaphorical journey the traveler embarks on, underscoring
that the physical journey is structured in a way that one maps a certain geographic location and
comes to an end: the end of the geographic journey. However, the metaphorical journey the
traveler embarks on is one that is constantly in a state of boundary shifting, where examining and
re-examining one‘s own identity and culture against the other and the other culture is an ongoing
process that never ends (9). Samman experiences ongoing transformations in her identity
throughout her travels through a similar process. Not only does she stop at negotiating, defining,
and redefining her own identity and culture and the identity of the others and the culture of the
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other she encounters in a dichotomous structure, but she goes further, exploring the possibilities
of an ―elsewhere‖ that incorporates a new subjectivity. Becoming stateless while wandering
between different European and Arab countries and cultures gives her the possibility of a more
detached sense of cultural identity, which causes her to make her wandering self the point of
departure when examining and scrutinizing the different cultures she encounters. As the title of
her travelogue, The Body Is a Traveling Suitcase, suggests, she makes her body and her unsettled
subjectivity the place of departure from which she negotiates identities, cultures, and places she
encounters, including her own. As a result, her body becomes the ―elsewhere‖ that she constructs
anew, and this frees her from the restrictions of operating within a rigid, homogenous identity in
favor of a rootless cosmopolitan one. Also, her body becomes the dominating travel trope that
carries the here, the there, the elsewhere, and the combination of all three together in a newly
constructed home that she encompasses. Most importantly, when she does encompass different
cultural identities, she refuses the primacy of an authentic self and highlights the complexity of a
multilayered identity.
Since Samman begins her travels with a sense of lost identity, she starts the first chapter
of her travelogue by reflecting on the painful mode of exile she found herself plunged into. The
moments of departure from Lebanon and arrival in London are highly symbolic, reflecting the
emotional and psychological state of mind that accompanies her throughout her travels. Upon her
very first encounter with London, she recounts how she was ―received‖ by the severe cold in
London, as opposed to the warmth she left back in Beirut:
I was received by the frost in London. And I remembered that the sun had set once and
for all with the face of the person who saw me off at the airport in Beirut and it hasn‘t
risen ever since. It was six in the evening. And I said to myself let it be a winter evening I
spend next to the fireplace. Then came seven. And eight. And nine. And then ten but the
evening wasn‘t dark. The sky seemed as if to transform into a robot‘s eye: big, hollow,
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and grey but with no eyelashes or tears. […] The night skies in London are like dead
canvas hung up high just like a ceiling. And the moon, the wandering poet of the night,
doesn‘t even reach the frame of that sky. And so I realized that the London evening
doesn‘t get dark before eleven. At that moment I realized what the magic of the East
meant to the English women. And the Eastern desert that is clean of the smoke of
chimneys, with its warmth and moon, is an essential part of that magic of the East.
(Samman13)
This very first encounter with London is crucial on many levels. It is this encounter with London
that sets the mood for the encounters with other places Samman travels to. She reacts with a
sense of alienation and estrangement from the foreign environment she gets in contact with. Not
only that, whenever she encounters a new place, she cannot help but directly compare it to home.
This direct comparison between London and home translates into an acute awareness that during
her travels she will continue to compare and contrast being at home and being abroad, a
dichotomous way of thinking that renders her observations highly subjective even while she
claims to be objective, where home and abroad are clearly divided, failing to transcend the
dichotomy of home and abroad and the association she attaches to each place.
Interestingly, she not only compares London and Beirut to one another according to her
own perception, she compares the way the East, its nights, and the desert are viewed by the
other, namely English women. Samman highlights that through allowing space in her narrative to
present the views of others, she does not allow the painful mode of exile to dominate her
narrative or color her judgment of the places she visits. Rather, this state of exile allows her to
first present her own perceptions of places and people and then bring into focus the perceptions
the others have about her own culture and identity, while presenting a critique of both
perceptions and viewpoints. Having this double observation allows her to assume different
positions, where she at times presents her views of the others, while at other times she puts
herself in the others‘ position, where they objectively view her. However, when Samman claims
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to understand the way English women view the East and its nights, she unfortunately, presents an
objective judgment.
After the first cold night she spends in London, Samman decides to explore the streets of
the city to try to connect to anything familiar she might encounter. However, she starts touring
Soho Street, haunted by an unsettling sense of estrangement toward the physical surroundings
she passes. The windows of buildings are too frightening for her, and she imagines that a dagger
could be thrust from any of the dark windows. The ―yellow lights‖ in the street create in her a
sense of ―fear, anxiety and illness‖ (14). Entering the street and walking through it, she
contemplates how it makes one ―feel worried and anxious‖ because of the unfamiliarity of the
place (14); this sense of estrangement does not come from one source but rather from
experiencing the unknown, an unfamiliar setting, as if it carries enmity toward the person who
encounters it for the first time. It is important to note that Samman‘s first encounter with any
foreign environment is characterized by a sense of fear and anxiety, with which she overburdens
herself by assuming that the foreign environment receives her with those very same sentiments.
It seems that Samman constantly projects her own fear onto her new surroundings to underscore
that the first encounter with an unfamiliar other is naturally shrouded with an element of
strangeness and alienation.
To overcome her sense of alienation and fear, Samman is reminded of a more pleasant
place, Bals Street, which ran through her university back in Beirut. She starts recalling how
peaceful it was when she used to overlook it from the classroom during class. Every memory of
Bals Street, including ―its lights that aren‘t yellow,‖ brings about feelings of comfort and inner
calm, as opposed to the feelings Soho Street has triggered in her (14). It becomes a strategy for
her to constantly compare her immediate surroundings, especially ones she encounters for the
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first time, with an equivalent element from back home. These immediate comparisons she draws
become a constant reminder of the in-between space she occupies despite her physical location.
It is very important to note that this type of comparison keeps her in an ambiguous state, where
her past is always brought alive in a present that she does not easily accept. However, after she
recovers from the initial shock, she is able to distance herself from preliminary judgment and to
reach a more informed perception that is less affected by her past.
Another element of comparison between Beirut and London Samman elaborates on as
she continues her observations of the British society and the wider Western culture generally is
the West‘s lack of spirituality, as opposed to the rich Eastern spiritual cultures. While still in
London, she will spend her time sitting at Mustafa‘s Cafe, a coffee shop owned by a Pakistani
man. What strikes her there is the sense of spirituality, lacking elsewhere in London, that comes
with Mustafa himself from the East, a world that has been traditionally associated with
spirituality, according to Samman. Mustafa‘s facial features alone have an ―exotic Eastern
magical effect that dominates all the youthful men surrounding him‖ (14). She describes the way
the local men approach Mustafa: ―They speak to him with such kindness and utmost respect that
I imagine their appreciation of him comes from their hunger for a spiritual life they associate
with the East‖ (14). Undeniably, her comment on the locals‘ admiration of Mustafa is a criticism
of the lack in English culture of the spirituality that a person from the East longs to have and
enjoy, especially that Samman stresses throughout the travelogue the importance of spirituality
that brings about a sense of fulfillment. These bold dichotomous distinctions Samman continues
to structure her observations accordingly are ones that render her sense of judgment of other
cultures problematic, where she is unable to present an objective view of the English culture
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without coloring it with her own perceptions of how the culture of the West, specifically Europe,
is opposite to the cultures of the East, the Middle East specifically.
Following Samman‘s personal perceptions of place, Mustafa‘s Cafe, a hangout for such
famous persons and celebrities as members of the Rockers and the Beatles, is a place where the
East and some of its values, represented by Mustafa as well as Samman herself, come face -toface with Europe and its values. Samman visits the café to observe the famous celebrities who
come to express their individuality through such things as their music and their unique dress
styles. She notices that the Beatles and the regular customers of the café have a common
characteristic: they consider themselves rebels against the dull, material Western way of life, but
they do so through material expression that is only a thin disguise over that existence, which
remains unchanged. For example, the Beatles, who dedicated their music to expressing their
individuality and revolting against materialistic culture, have done so superficially, through
wearing unique leather pullovers that present them solely in a different fashion style than others
(15). But their unique dress code does not really represent the true spirit of revolt: change and
revolt happen not through a superficial makeover of one‘s appearance but rather through
impacting actual social issues, like solving the issue of poverty and achieving social justice. Her
critical observation of the café locals leads her to make general conclusions about the
materialism of Western culture and how it is destructive to human existence. Her criticism of the
mechanized structure of Western societies, where people are more robot-like than human,
consumed with work and pressured into conformity, is ironic, since she does not provide actual
details of how the return to spirituality represents a viable solution. It just seems that even then
she cannot distance her judgment of others from her own biases. Despite the fact that Samman
poses as a cosmopolitan persona, she continues to other European societies as if they are a
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homogeneous entity, casting her subjective judgment upon them, without challenging her own
preconceived stereotypes about the European societies.
Moreover, while being critical about the way the Rockers and the Beatles express
individuality, Samman attributes this revolt to the loss of familial ties in the West. It is true that
she is not an advocate of the family having a strong grip over the freedom of the individual, yet
she sees that the total dismantling of the family institution and its values is a loss to society as a
whole; it can lead to freedom, but this freedom is destructive, and ―it cancels itself because it
becomes the type of freedom that is taken away by the city one lives in. It‘s the type of freedom
where the individual chooses to die without anybody dedicating time to stopping it. It‘s the
freedom where the community does not grant the individual personal freedom, but rather it stops
caring about the destiny of the individual‖ (16). That is, when the family starts to deteriorate and
loses its ability to nurture, love and care disappear with it. Samman values family love and
containment the same way she values individual freedom. It seems that what she advocates while
observing the English culture is the achievement of a balance between individual freedom and
the family institution, where one does not cancel the other. Her travel and touring in London for
the day comes to an end while she continues to contemplate the sense of loss of spirituality,
individualism, and security of the family in London and Western society generally.
Unfortunately, even while Samman inserts her own perspective on how a balance should be
achieved between acquiring individual freedoms and yet grounding it within the family
institution, she judges English culture‘s failure to achieve such balance from her single day‘s
observation touring the streets of London. Even though Samman at times seems to pose as a
cosmopolitan, she fails to embrace different traditions, customs, and ideologies, and thus fails to
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rise above the binary thinking of East-West. This narrow way of observing the other while
journeying into different cultural spaces, makes of Samman a highly opinionated cosmopolitan.
Moreover, Samman criticizes the lack of communication between individuals in London.
She believes that the English suffer from isolation and lack of authentic social relationships that
pushes them to start a typical, lifeless conversation with total strangers most of the time. As she
is at the train station waiting for her train, a stranger says to her, ―Nice weather, right?‖ ―‗Good
weather‘ is the traditional greeting expression the English use when starting a conversation
during moments of kind verbal exchange. It is the only expression that breaks through the
awkward moments of silence that engulf individuals due to their isolation from each other, but
then it allows the unfolding of a long free-of-charge conversation‖ (32). What bothers her about
this type of exchange is its lack of genuine concern and care.
And yet, despite this criticism, she attributes the way the English communicate mainly to
the machine-like lifestyle the whole society suffers from. Commenting on this lifestyle, Samman
quotes the Beatles: ―It‘s been a hard day‘s night and I‘ve been working like a dog‖ (41). She
further explains that the English are not alone in being guilty of this; they are similar to other
Western societies that ―are always running breathless after the train, their office hour, etc. They
eat their fast food while running amidst crowds and their brain is just like their stomach; it only
digests canned food. They no longer have time to search for the truth of existence nor to exercise
all their feelings, for the heart where love grows in on a large humanistic level will never be
stingy to share it with other individuals wherever they are‖ (42). Her critique, particularly of
English society and of Western society at large, comes basically from her unconscious drawing
of parallels between Arab societies and the West, a biased observation for the mere fact that she
draws her conclusions about different cultures and societies by making her experience of her
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own culture the point of departure for such comparisons. Also, making blanket conclusions about
all European cultures based on her experience of London alone discredits her sense of judgment.
As discussed above, Samman in London assumes the role of the observer and critic, but
she does not actually look objectively at London and the culture she encounters. It seems that
whenever she observes an element of British culture, she judges it through her own subjective
perspective, and her opinion becomes her point of departure for viewing the Other. However,
even though she judges London through her own subjectivity, she remains aware that she is not
presenting an objective perspective, since that is an impossible position for anyone to occupy
when viewing other people, cultures, and societies. It is important to note that Samman starts her
travels and journeys by subconsciously assuming the role of the biased observer and critic when
perceiving the other, because without centering her subjectivity as the point of departure she will
not be able to detach herself from that biased self.
As the plane takes off from London en route to Greece, Samman starts reflecting on the
meaning of journey and travel and what a person achieves when traveling. For her, the most
important trope that concerns her when traveling is the moment of departure:
I leave, I leave, and I leave. And if I return, that is because I plan to leave once more. I
continue to leave maybe to prove to myself that the real departure is when I depart from
myself. However, with every departure, I feel that I get closer to my true self! […] And
perhaps I constantly leave because every departure leads to home; the home that lives
within us. All the planes I board eventually land me home. (44)
Samman‘s constant departure is motivated by the desire not only to explore and discover
geographic locations, cultures, and peoples, but also to discover her own subjectivity. It seems
that she represents the meaning of home and the politics of location by whom they affect her
perception of self, subjectivity, and identity, which are constantly shifting and changing.
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Likewise, her sense of place and her definition of home do not provide her with a sense of
stability; rather, they connect her to an identity, whatever form and shape that identity takes. Her
concept of home is not the physical structure that one resides in; rather, home resides within the
person, since she connects home to identity. For her, the experience one gains through travel and
the way it shapes a person‘s identity is what creates the sense home within her. And since the
notion of both home and identity are connected to the experience one gains while living, despite
the place of residency, these two concepts will always be reconstituted and changed according to
the experience one goes through. Also, what follows the departure from one place is an arrival at
a new place, which for Samman marks the arrival to a new aspect of her identity she was not
previously familiar with. Her constant state of departure reflects the reconfiguration of her
identity, an aspect that she thoroughly enjoys experiencing while traveling.
Sarup points out two different ways of viewing place and its relationship to identity,
providing two views on identity: the modernist view and the traditionalist view:
Places are created through capital investment. Capital is about technological change and
the expansion of places. Places should always be seen in a historical and economic
context. In recent years, money capital has become more mobile. Places are created,
expanded, then images are constructed to represent and sell these places. […]. In contrast
to this Marxist view there is a phenomenological approach. Heidegger, for example,
believed that place is the locale of Being. He was very aware that time and spaces have
been transformed through technological change. He shared with Marx a dislike of the
market and was antagonistic to the fetishization of commodities. In Heidegger‘s view
there were authentic and inauthentic places. He thought about ―dwelling‖, and place and
placelessness. He was aware of rootedness and thought of those people who had lost their
rootedness in place.‖ (96)
Samman subscribes to the traditionalist view when talking about place in general and the places
she visits in particular and their effect on her identity. Since she stresses that for her, home is the
place that resides within, it seems that she reiterates Heidegger‘s view on the relationship
between place and ―Being.‖ Similar to Heidegger‘s remark, ―place is the locale of Being,‖
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Samman believes that each place she visits is a place that sets her on a path to becoming. She
acknowledges that her identity is affected by each place she visits and that her journeys and trips
are actually the locale of her becoming. Every place she stops by contributes to the making of her
identity, and thus with her ongoing travels her identity is transformed and recomposed along the
road. And since her subjectivity is constantly being altered and changed, the best part of her trip
is the moment of departure, where departure stands for her willingness to move forward in the
making, remaking, and becoming of her identity, in addition to her willingness to make every
destination she visits a home that resides within her.
Moreover, the process of traveling and moving from one place to another is very
important to her, as she believes that the process of traveling around and journeying is as
important as the destination one sets out to reach: ―The most enticing part of traveling is to enjoy
the moving process as much as to enjoy the moment of reaching the destination‖ (44). As the
plane flies over the Mediterranean en route to Greece, she starts contemplating the magnificence
of a country like Greece and its great city of Athens. She believes that every traveler to Greece
must appreciatively reflect upon the remnants of this ancient civilization where ―human beings
conversed with the gods for the first time‖ and listen to the whispers of Plato‘s philosophy in the
walls of the city (46). For her this symbolic reflection is indeed the occasion to acknowledge the
richness of the identity of the cities and countries she visits prior to physically experiencing those
destinations.
Samman‘s travels not only allow her to view, admire, and criticize others, but also to see
how others view her and her Arab identity generally. Also, she finds herself simultaneously
disappointed by the West and the Western media‘s treatment and representation of her Arab
character and identity, while at the same time she projects her own criticism regarding her Arab
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identity and society generally. It is important to note that her awareness of her Arab identity and
the way it is viewed by the Western world marks the beginning of her political journey and its
representation in her literary works. Around the time of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, which
ends with the defeat of the Arabs and the victory of Israel, Samman makes several trips to
different European countries, including Switzerland, England, France, and Germany, where she
is bothered by the misrepresentation of Arabs in the West and Western media.
During her trip to Switzerland in 1967, Samman has an opportunity to stay at a youth
hostel, where she notices that the majority of the students staying there hold the utmost
admiration and respect for Israel, the only country in the Middle East whose existence they seem
to know about and acknowledge. While playing a game in which each player describes the
country he/she comes from while the others try to guess the name of the country, Samman
mentions several characteristics of Lebanon, including warm sun, history, religions, prophets,
and the Mediterranean. The students find it hard to guess Samman‘s place of origin, and they are
silent for a few moments. Then a student from Switzerland guesses, ―Israel, of course!‖ (62),
after which several other students mention how much they have enjoyed the beaches of Haifa
and Jaffa during their trips to Israel. What bothers Samman particularly about the students‘
reaction to the mere mention of Israel is that they seem to have been brought up to think of Israel
as the only center of civilization in the Middle East. After the game is over and the students
gather for dinner, Samman is pursued by a fellow student who insists on knowing the name of
her country. When Samman answers, ―Syria … Lebanon,‖ the student dismissively replies, ―You
mean a neighboring country to Israel?‖ (64). And even before Samman has the opportunity to
reply, the student hands her a booklet about Israel. From this incident and her observation during
her later visits around Europe, she comes to the conclusion that Israel has sold Europe on a
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narrative of victimization, where they have risen in the Middle East as a strong and flourishing
country despite the harshness they face from the neighboring countries (64).
However, what Samman finds most disturbing is that the West and Western media are
biased when representing the Israeli narrative because they adopt it completely without
challenging it by acknowledging the existence of another narrative, the Arab Palestinian one. She
undergoes shock from what she calls the media war that Israel constantly wins because of the
backing and support of the West. What she calls Israeli propaganda to gain the West‘s sympathy
is not limited to Western media and news outlets, but also includes other forms of representation,
including music, literature, and the arts in general.
In France, while heading to the bus station, Samman overhears the lyrics of a song being
performed by a street singer about Israel. She describes the song as one that ―speaks of the
peaceful people who live in Urshalim. It‘s about the thirty thousand trees they‘ve planted and
about the Arabs who deprive them access to the necessary water resource—the Jordan River—to
water them!!!‖ (68). Not only that, when Samman reaches her hotel in Paris and is about to
check in, she notices an announcement on the hotel billboard for a documentary that will be
shown that night, followed by the opening of an art gallery. And then later in the evening, as she
passes by a bookstore, she notices a book about the Israeli cause in a showcase. She scans
through the book and summarizes its subject matter: ―The return of the Israeli people, who have
been homeless and dispossessed of their land since the days of the Pharaohs, to their promised
land to fight the primitive Arabs in order to civilize them […]‖ (86). If anything, Samman cannot
but admire the commitment the West displays toward Israel, as if it is their adopted child. Her
critique of the West and its attitude towards Israel is that it highlights the dispossession suffered
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by Israelis in the past, but when Palestinians suffer injustice, their just narrative of victimization
and dispossession is underrepresented or even totally neglected.
Samman shows how biased the Western media is, not only when neglecting the
Palestinian narrative, but also when representing Arabs generally. During a trip to London, she
watches a program on British TV and notices that the only Arab in the show is the enemy of the
protagonist. This kind of representation makes Samman question whether the show was
basically adopting the Israeli view regarding Arabs and Palestinians, and when she expresses her
annoyance to an English friend regarding this, he defends the show, claiming that in every show
there must be a villain who is either from Japan, China, or the Arab world. Not convinced, she
continues to wonder why Israelis never appear as villains in such shows and concludes that all
British media is controlled by Israeli propaganda.
Following her disappointment with the representation of Arabs in the West and the
Western media, Samman endures an unfortunate experience at the airport in West Berlin that
makes her reexamine her Arab identity and its relationship to the West. Upon approaching the
security check at the airport after de-planing and presenting her passport to the officer in charge,
she is shocked by the sudden reaction of the officer, who immediately takes her passport from
her after learning that she is a Syrian/Lebanese Arab. The officer starts making phone calls and
talking in German, a language she does not understand. After she has waited few minutes to get
her passport back, two guards approach her and snatch away her camera to be checked and her
suitcase to be inspected. Then she finds herself led to an office, where she is inspected by a
female officer, who scans her body to make sure she is not carrying any dangerous tools (388).
At that moment, she starts laughing hysterically, for she does not expect such uncalled-for
attention. Upon leaving the Berlin airport in a taxi, she pulls a mirror from her bag and takes a
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long look at herself, wondering what it could have been that caused the officer to call for her to
be inspected. What appears to her in the mirror is a mere reflection of her face: a face with a
light-brown complexion, just like those of millions of other Arabs. Only then does she realize
that her Arab light-brown complexion is what triggered the mistrust and suspicion of the airport
officer from the beginning. She realizes how the Arab image in the Western collective
imagination has been distorted because of the Arab–Israeli conflict and the media‘s biased
representation of Arabs as figures of mistrust and suspicion.
Because Samman realizes that the image of Arabs in the Western consciousness is at its
worst, she further investigates why this image in artistic and literary representations has not been
challenged by Arab people, governments, and mainstream media. She believes that the Arab
identity has been not only misrepresented by the West but also neglected by Arabs themselves:
the Arabs cultural unity have always been neglected by its own people and governments. The
reason behind her constant departure and journeying throughout Europe is that she is prohibited
by the Syrian government to access her homeland after her initial trip to London.
Being abandoned by her own government and not having anybody to support her or
protest the injustice she was faced with in her homeland has made of Samman a harsh critic of
the Syrian government and Arab governments generally. Also, when comparing the individual
freedom a person exercises in the West to that of a person from the Arab world, she affirms sadly
that there is freedom of speech in the West, but the Arab person is censored and controlled by the
government. When talking about the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, she affirms that it
was a defeat not only because the Arabs lost to Israel, but also because it was the actual outcome
of the twenty years of oppression and repression the Arab people had endured living under
dictatorships: ―It was not only a literal defeat but rather it was the defeat of the Arab people
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before its rulers and the defeat and failure of those rulers to understand their people and represent
them‖ (77).
The limitations on individual expression are not limited to speech; similar limitations are
imposed on artistic expressions and representations. Even the committed literature written by
Arab writers about Arab causes, especially the Palestinian dispossession, Samman describes as in
its infancy, not in a place to ever compete with the literature that is committed to defending and
promoting Israel and the Israeli cause.
Toward the end of her travelogue, Samman writes about the mixed feelings she has while
transiting from one place to another. She claims that while she is in transit mode, her sense of
detachment and alienation is at its peak, because the state of transiting disconnects her from both
the place she departs from and the place of arrival. This state of in-betweenness is actually where
she sees her identity located; a neutral place controlled by neither the past nor the future: the past
is left behind when she leaves the last city of departure, and the future is still unknown, since she
has not yet reached the city of arrival. According to Samman, this state of transiting actually
represents life itself, a place where people are temporarily spending time en route to another
place beyond their knowledge. However, what she likes about this state of transiting is that it is
the place where she starts looking at things clearly (500). She reflects on her identity and what
has become of her throughout her travels and states that the one thing she does not get
disconnected from, even while transiting, is Damascus and the smell of jasmine that reminds her
of home (501). This type of romantic nostalgia to home Samman exhibits toward the end of the
travelogue demonstrates her final failure to become the cosmopolitan rootless persona she tries
to inhabit during her travel narrative. It becomes apparent to the reader of her travelogue that the
pains of dislocation and the state of exile she feels while traveling limits her ability finally to end
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her travel narrative in an objective manner. Samman remains entrapped by her personal
perception of place since she continues to maintain home and her own experience of home a
point of departure when examining and experiencing other people, cultures, and locations.
Samman concludes her text by stating that she will leave traveling behind and settle in
Beirut because she is sick of the world of electric hotels in Europe. She is sick of the cold
weather and the atmosphere that faces her every time she leaves one European city for another
and one country for another (513). Eventually, she decides to return to Beirut in 1976, thinking
that returning to Lebanon will bring back to her the warmth she feels when being in an Arab
capital, the warmth of a place like home. She does so and acquires Lebanese citizenship upon
marrying a Lebanese man. She closes her travelogue with the thought that ―all the riches of the
worlds one visits brought together will never be able to purchase that root that one plants in a
place called home, where one not only lives but gets properly nourished‖ (513). This emphasis
on leaving the world of traveling and returning back home is a note she leaves her readers with
as a reminder that roots and home are always essential to be acknowledged as the initial places of
departure, where one leaves behind roots that remain important, despite the places one to which
travels, journeys, or moves. Even though Samman does choose to return to Lebanon after
traveling throughout Europe, she will leave once more with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil
war the same year she returns, and ever since, she has lived between Beirut and Paris.
When Samman evokes the trope of returning to roots at the end of her travel narrative, it
becomes problematic: travel and displacement are conditions that naturally de-center constructs
associated with roots, such as essence, origin, and belonging. xxvii These concepts attached to
roots present essentialist notions of identity and subjectivity that undermine the travel
experiences Samman goes through, as she claims to be a rootless cosmopolitan traveler. In
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addition, Samman‘s inability to deconstruct her dichotomous observation of home and abroad
and her inability to rise above her binary perceptions of the East–West dichotomy during her
travels, renders her travalogue subjective and highly opinionated despite her claims otherwise.
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CHAPTER TWO
Transformative Journeys: Social Class, Culture -Crossing, and Hybridity in Ahdaf Soueif’s
In the Eye of the Sun
Introduction
Ahdaf Soueif‘s 1992 novel, In the Eye of the Sun, covers the period between 1967 until
1980 in the personal life of her female protagonist, Asya al-Ulama. The narrative chronicles the
tumultuous personal spatial, emotional, psychological and sexual journey Asya goes through
while living as a hybrid diasporic subject between Egypt and England, and during her short visits
to Beirut, Italy and the United States. Born to an upper class Egyptian, Western-educated
family—her mother has finished her PhD in England and is working as an English professor at
Cairo University—Asya is raised and educated in both England and Egypt. It is in Egypt that
Asya first becomes familiar with English language and culture, just like her other friends who
belong to the same social stratum, where their knowledge of the English language and culture
marks them as the modern elite in Egyptian society at the time. Even though the novel follows
closely the journey and the cross-cultural personal experiences Asya goes through that shape her
personal identity, Soueif contextualizes Asya‘s experiences through narrating social and political
events and changes that take place in Egypt at the time. However, these political and social
changes remain external factors that do not interfere directly in Asya‘s personal life
development; they only provide grounding to the way the social life in Egypt has changed and
how this change has contributed to Asya‘s perception of others, her identity formation, and her
individual journey towards self-realization and actualization.
Analyzing In the Eye of the Sun according to Soueif‘s theoretical writings on the concept
of the imaginary space, Mezzaterra and ―the common ground‖ (4), as well as Homi Bhabha‘s
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concept of the ―third space‖ of identity enunciation and ―hybridity‖ (Rutherford 211), I argue
that Asya‘s hybrid identity is initially acquired in Egypt due to her social class, but then it
becomes grounded firmly as she travels to England, where she constantly engages in the act of
identity negotiation and self transformation. Asya does not define her identity through her
struggle against an extremist traditional Islamic culture in Egypt nor against Western
imperialism; her complex hybridity is one that is acquired gradually, starting from her
upbringing during the period of what Soueif terms Mezzaterra in the Egypt of the mid-1960s to
her journey to England. It is only when she manages to reclaim her individual agency by
constructing a personal, hybrid life that balances her Egyptian and English experience that she is
able to define herself. Asya towards the end of her narrative does not attempt to resolve the
paradoxes and conflicts that she obtains from experiencing Egypt and England, but she rather is
able to negotiate a common space to translate herself into. Yet, upon her final return to Egypt,
Asya‘s hybridity is threatened by the shrinking Mezzaterra space in Egypt that she senses,
causing her to further embody feelings of alienation and detachment from her homeland.
Prior to the physical journeys she embarks on, Asya was brought up in a space that was
defined by the elite, upper-middle class in the Egyptian society she belonged to, where cultures
met and fused, especially the Egyptian and English, constructing a hybrid social class that did
not define itself according to the political antagonism between Egypt and England at the time.
Conversely, during the geographic journeys she undertakes from Egypt to England (and her short
trips to Beirut, Italy, and the United States) and then back to Egypt, Asya acquires a hybrid
identity that puts to question any notion of a fixed affiliation to a specific place, whether it be
Egypt, her place of birth and early upbringing, or England, the place where she experiences full
independence and maturity. Her journey and travels become the means that allow Asya to
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develop a voice, agency, and a sensibility to negotiate her hybrid experience of self, places,
people, history, and politics in the different territories she inhabits. Also, Asya goes through a
journey that involves reclaiming her psychological, emotional, and sexual desires, as she learns
how to locate an agency of empowerment in the different places she inhabits, mainly Egypt and
England, against those who would have otherwise denied her agency, acquiring a unique hybrid
identity of her own construction.
It is the trope of movement and travel that allows Asya‘s personal hybrid identity to
constantly engage in the act of translating herself in the different places she occupies, as well as
translating the places she gets in contact with, finally inhabiting what Bhabha calls ―the third
space‖ of identity articulation, where her identity is in a constant state of ―enunciation‖ and
transformation despite the location she settles in. The following elaboration on this ―third space‖
gives us insight into understanding the way Asya defines and identifies with her hybrid identity:
The act of cultural translation (both as representation and as reproduction) denies the
essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture, than we see that all forms of
culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is
not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather
hybridity to me is the ‗third space‘ which enables other positions to emerge. This third
space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority,
new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom.
(Rutherford 211)
True to this definition, Soueif‘s construction of Asya‘s identity is one that refuses any notion of a
fixed identification with a place of origin or the place she later inhabits. It is as Asya‘s identity is
being (trans)formed by the different places she occupies that she also attempts to engage in an
imaginative construction of the places she occupies to fit her hybrid identity. This hybrid
subjectivity Asya acquires is not necessarily one that celebrates cultural difference; rather, it
complicates and defies any fixed construction of the Arab Muslim woman‘s subjectivity and
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experience in any place she inhabits. In this sense, Soueif‘s narrative represents what Bhabha
calls ―beyond,‖ occupying the borderline between the past and present, which represents the ―inbetween‖ space that becomes a ―terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or
communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and
contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself‖ (1-2). Toward the end of the
narrative, Asya realizes that occupying this in-between space is a lonely site that she will have to
accept as a natural condition of her displacement and dislocation even within the boundaries of
her home, Egypt. Yet this in-between space becomes the site and location that grants her the
agency to speak up for herself against the competing discourses that will try to define her
according to preconceived notions of her identity as an Anglo-Arab Muslim woman.
Soueif engages the Anglo-Arab encounter in the majority of her fictional writings, where
she explores the possibility of a positive encounter between Egypt and England while
questioning both the ―continuing pressures of Western imperialism, and conservative antimodernist cultural Islamism‖ (Nash 29). The majority of her characters, especially her female
protagonists, occupy a space that allows the negotiation of the duality of their experiences in
Egypt and in England. Soueif is mainly concerned in her fiction with representing the experience
of Arab woman characters who oscillate between the East and West and finally manage to
negotiate their cross-cultural experience and resolve the tension that exists between those two
cultural spaces, claiming a unique hybrid identity of their own construction. In creating complex,
multi-layered Arab woman characters in her fiction, Soueif displays an acute awareness of
Western misrepresentation of Arab women‘s identities and experiences, the traditional
stereotyping of the role of the Arab woman within her own culture, and the misunderstandings
that could possibly occur in any cross-cultural encounter. Due to this cross-cultural experience,
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Soueif‘s female characters display an awareness of their position within these two competing
discourses by challenging both, while allowing their positive cultural experiences of the East,
Egypt specifically, and West, England, to interact, compete, and intersect at times, finally
grounding themselves in a personalized, constructed in-between place that allows what Edward
Said calls in his article, ―The Anglo-Arab Encounter,‖ a ―complex hybrid‖ identity to emerge
(407).
Soueif‘s four major fictional narratives, which include her two short story collections,
Aisha and The Sandpiper, and her two novels, In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love,
explore the complex negotiation the female protagonists engage, dealing with issues related to
misunderstandings and misconceptions they encounter during their East-West experience.
Among the issues her female protagonists negotiate are the East-West power relations, colonial
and postcolonial politics, Orientalist misrepresentations, traditional cultural stereotypes, gender
dynamics and sexual politics, themes that appear in any Anglo-Arab encounter represented in
literature. What is unique about Soueif‘s treatment of these themes is that she manages to situate
her protagonists in complex hybrid spaces that allow them to reclaim their personal identities and
individual narratives without preferring one culture over the other. Susan Darraj has argued that
Soueif‘s ―hybrid‖ works are intensely post-colonial in nature:
[Soueif] subverts the colonizer/colonized hierarchy by presenting England a picture of its
colonial past and postcolonial present, complete with all accompanying tensions, thus
turning her Egyptian postcolonial gaze on England‘s eye of poser. Her work gives the
colonized a voice not only to be heard, but to influence the English/Arab literary
landscape as she describes Arab women exposed to British culture and influence (and
vice versa), who seek to find their own voices and take control of the narrative of their
lives. (92)
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While Soueif does indeed address themes linked to the East-West encounter and the tension that
exists between the two spaces due to the history of postcolonialism in Egypt and the imbalanced
power relations in the Anglo-Arab encounter, these tensions do not define the struggles her
protagonists‘ experience. In In the Eye of the Sun, Soueif addresses the tension and paradoxes
that occur in the course of the Anglo-Arab encounter, yet from Asya‘s personal point of view.
Asya does not look at the East-West or Egypt-England encounter as a clash of civilizations, but
rather she views it as a relationship based on her personal attachment to the two places despite
the colonial past that ties the two places together. After relocating to England to peruse her PhD
and while walking on the bank of the Thames, Asya remembers the Nile and relates the
experience of viewing the Thames as one that reminds her of the majestic view of the Nile back
home. Yet, as she continues walking, the view of Whitehall before her and the accoutrements of
empire bring to her mind England‘s imperial past and how it gained its glory:
The accoutrements of empire. Built of course on Egyptian cotton and debt, on the wealth
of India, on the sugar of the West Indies, on centuries of adventure and exploitation
ending in the division of the Arabs […]. Why then does she not find it in her heart to feel
resentment or bitterness or anything but admiration for and pleasure in the beauty, the
graciousness, the harmony of this scene? Is it because the action is all in the past; because
this is an ―empire in decline‖ and all the magnificence is only a—monument, rather like
the great temples of Abu Simbel or Deir Bahari? Or is it because the thoughts, the words,
the poetry that wound their way down the years in parallel with the fortunes of the
Empire have touched her so nearly and pulled her in so close that she feels herself a part
of all this? (511-512)
Asya‘s personal identification with England‘s landscape, language, culture, and literature is what
gives her a sense of belonging despite the history of England‘s imperialism in her home country,
Egypt. Asya is not naive or oblivious to this colonial history, but she personally decides to view
it as part of the past and thus identifies with the aspects she admires most in England‘s culture
and literature. Not viewing the relationship between England and Egypt on historical or political
terms is a tactic Asya personally follows in order to be able to experience both places on equal
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terms and thus immerse herself in an authentic hybrid experience. Soueif deals with issues of
colonialism and postcolonialism in a similar manner in the rest of her fictional writings. It is
through the negotiation of the paradoxes of their cross-cultural experiences, the sense of
belonging to both cultures, and the refusal to allow either of the two cultures to solely define
their identities that the protagonists reclaim their hybrid individuality. Soueif is concerned with
writing narratives that are not overwhelmingly political but rather represent the myriad
individual, personal complex identities the Arab Muslim woman could inhabit while moving
between the East and West, despite the political-historical discourses that overshadow their
personal narratives and their private lives.
In his book chapter, ―Arab-Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity,‖ Amin
Malak argues that Soueif‘s fictional writings are ―interlinked by characters, episodes, and crossreferences that suggest a quasi-autobiographical slant to the narrative whose instigating impulse
is to highlight the process of emotional and intellectual growth of its privileged, upper-middleclass heroines: Aisha, Asya, and Amal‖ (128). It is this upper-middle-class position Soueif and
her protagonists inhabit that actually facilitates the crossing from one culture to another, a
privilege that not all Arab women from different social classes enjoy. It is important to note that
this class position they inhabit is one among the multiple dimensions that inform their complex
multilayered identities and inform their cross-cultural experience. However, in his book chapter,
―Ahdaf Soueif: England, Egypt, Sexual Politics,‖ Geoffrey Nash criticizes the autobiographical
bent that influences Soueif‘s writings by claiming that it reduces her ability to complicate the
experience of her female characters when negotiating their space between cultures, a fact that
leaves her readers and critics unsure about ―how far [she] is able to extend her appraisal of crosscultural relations beyond her own personal engagement with British and Egyptian culture‖ (86).
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Malik points out that Soueif‘s female protagonists at times occupy an unapologetic elitist social
class that is not sympathetic to women from other classes: in Aisha, the collection of short stories
that is called after the main female character-narrator and protagonist, Aisha talks about herself
as a ―Westernized bourgeois intellectual,‖ displaying an air of superiority due to her
―acquisitions and souvenirs purchased in different cities of the world‖ (138). Conversely, in her
novel review of Soueif‘s In the Eye of the Sun, ―A Woman Caught between Two Worlds,‖ Leila
Ahmad criticizes Soueif for the biased elitism her heroines display, especially Asya, the
protagonist, who judges other female characters in Egypt based on class differences, and the
different ways they perceive practicing Islam according to their class distinctions (6). Ahmad
highlights the fact that Asya‘s preoccupation with her own struggle between her social class and
the way it clashes with local Egyptian Islamic cultural manifestations in public life renders her
oblivious to the struggle of other Egyptian women from lower social classes. While I agree with
Ahmad‘s assessment that Asya‘s social class disconnects her from the plight of other women
from lower social classes in Egyptian society, I argue that In the Eye of the Sun is a narrative
about the individual, personal struggle Asya al-Ulama goes through on her journey towards selfdiscovery, while negotiating the different social and cultural spaces that also transform and
change throughout her journey.
In addition, Suzan Darraj defends the apparent superficiality inherent in Asya‘s social
class: ―her existence seems terribly superficial and trite; she worries about painting her toenails
and fixing her hair. However, there is much more to this protagonist—she plans to earn a PhD in
English literature and to become a university professor […]‖ (98). While Soueif‘s construction of
her protagonists‘ lifestyle is socially elitist, it is Asya‘s social class that allows her the
opportunity to cross from one place to another and from one culture to another, This has allowed
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Asya the opportunity to explore the fruitful experiences as well as the misunderstanding and
tensions that exist between the cultures she encounters, the Egyptian and English, and thus
finally to construct her own hybrid identity in a space of her own imaginative creation.
In the Eye of the Sun: The Mezzaterra and Asya’s Budding Hybridity
While Asya moves from Egypt to England, through Beirut, Italy, and the United States
over short trips, then back to Egypt, she engages ―constantly in acts of translation and self
translation—what Teresa de Lauretis would call the double perspective of the semiotic subject‘s
representation and self-representation‖ (Cariello 314). Moving between these places allows her
to negotiate both her self-projection and her own perception of the new places she visits and the
people she encounters. The places Asya visits and lives in are not necessarily spaces that provide
her with liberation from her own cultural constraints; rather, they contribute in the development
and realization of her own psychological, emotional, and sexual identity. Joseph Massad
describes the kind of female characters Soueif represents in her writings, Asya being one of
them:
Soueif‘s aim is to cut through the confusion and stereotypes of society; the dissimulation
of international, national, and family politics; and the secure matrix through which life
and its desires are defined. The journey of her characters is not one where liberation is the
necessary telos, but rather the complex process through which the unfolding of
desire(s)—sexual, social, economic, and political—is shaped by the characters
themselves and all that surrounds them. (75)
In the narrative Asya is not an Arab woman suffering ―gender oppression‖ back in Egypt, nor is
she an ―escapee of her intrinsically oppressive culture‖ seeking refuge and freedom in England
(Kahf 143). On the contrary, she enjoys a great amount of freedom back in Egypt because of the
upper-level social class she comes from as opposed to the escape Samman‘s protagonist in Beirut
75 initiates because of poverty and the impoverished socio-economic class she comes from.
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Also, Asya‘s journeys outside Egypt are either for tourism or academic purposes, privileges she
enjoys because of the kind of education she receives and the social class she belongs to in Egypt.
Throughout the narrative and during her geographic journey from Egypt to England, Asya will
have to negotiate family, society, and sexual politics, seeking the fulfillment of her personal
desires to become an individual of her own choice in both Egypt and England.
Central to the elements Asya negotiates her identity against as she moves between Egypt
and England is the ―encounter of East and West, of Arabic and English, and of men and women
in an intercultural context‖ (Massad 75). Asya‘s cross-cultural experience starts in Egypt, even
though her background, family, and the majority of her friends are Egyptian.Soueif represents
Egypt of the early 1960s, in which Asya was born and raised, as a time when Egypt, Cairo
specifically, was Mezzaterra, a meeting space for many traditions and cultures to intermingle in
the name of modernity; English language and culture especially met and interacted with the Arab
Egyptian (―Mezzaterra‖ 4). This near utopia, theoretical, imagined space remains the initial
territory Asya inhabits in Egypt and is crucial to the initial formation of her identity before she
embarked on experiencing the unfamiliar territory of England and its effect on her hybrid
identity.
Having created Asya al-Ulama with an ―autobiographical bent,‖ it is not innocent that
Soueif chooses to position Asya in the very same space that she grew up in, experiencing in
Cairo in the 1960s (Massad 75). In an interview, Soueif admits to the affinities between herself
and the character of Asya: ―Her consciousness, her personality, her ambitions are all mine as I
remember them at the time‖ (el-Jesri 2). In her book,‖ The Mezzaterra: Fragments from the
Common Ground,‖ Soueif describes what it was like to grow up Egyptian in the 1960s:
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Growing up Egyptian in the Sixties meant growing up
Muslim/Christian/Egyptian/Arab/African/Mediterranean/Non-aligned/Socialist but happy
with small-scale capitalism. On top of that, if you were urban/professional the chances
were that you spoke English and/or French and danced to the Stones as readily as to Abd
el-Haleem. In Cairo on any one night you could go see an Arabic, English, French, Italian
or Russian film. (Mezzaterra, 4-5)
The Mezzaterra is Asya‘s geographic site of departure; it is the space and place where cultures
and traditions meet and interact, contributing to the initial hybrid identity Asya starts to construct
in Egypt. Being raised in a territory where cross-cultural experiences and knowledge were
intrinsically part of social life prepares her to have an elastic identity, one that is receptive of
knowledge, culture experiences, and people when and while she moves between different
cultures and geographic locations. It is from this privileged, imaginative constructed territory that
Asya first experiences the world while at home, celebrating both her Egyptian Arab identity and
what she has gained from interaction with Western culture.
Born into the elite class of Egyptian society, where her father is the dean at Cairo
University and her mother an English professor, Asya has been brought up in Mezzaterra. Asya‘s
parents have both lived in England for a considerable amount of time and have come back to an
Egypt where the English culture and knowledge are as familiar as the Egyptian or Arabic
language and its culture. In addition, Mezzaterra is the imaginary space that was inhabited by
those who were similar to Asya‘s parents in social class and education, forming Cairo‘s
intellectual elites in the mid 1960s. Asya is brought up in this ―common ground,‖ where cultures
and traditions meet and interact, producing hybridized identities.
In Egypt, Asya is granted Western education and allowed to a certain degree a Western
lifestyle, in which she loved vacationing with her parents in England, visiting the opera houses in
Cairo to watch Don Giovanni, and to listen to the music of Puccini, Verdi, and Mozart, while
also enjoying the songs of Umm Kalthoum and ‗Abd El-Halim, Egyptian popular singers, during
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her vacations in Alexandria. Also, she reads English and Russian literature in middle school prior
to majoring in English literature at the university. Her friends, who belong to her same social
class, have received the same type of upbringing, their education based on the infusion of
English and Western culture, languages, and literature into their Arabic culture. Furthermore, her
friends and acquaintances all speak perfect English, especially Saif Madi, whom she will fall in
love with and marry, due to their common membership in the bourgeoisie. Asya and her friends
highly admire English culture because it has given Egypt a secular modern façade; this is the
lifestyle their parents‘ generation has adopted and in which they want to raise their children.
Even within Egyptian society, Asya‘s acquaintances are from various backgrounds. There is the
Greek girl from her university. Another friend‘s brother is in love with a Coptic girl, and his
family accepts his marriage to her on the basis that the prophet Muhammad had married a Coptic
woman. Still another friend‘s boyfriend is Palestinian, and despite her family‘s disapproval she
will marry him later in the narrative. This background prepares her to deal with difference in a
positive manner; she acts upon a sense of affinity and identification with the different cultures
and people she interacts with and meets.
Furthermore, Soueif closely relates Egyptian politics to politics in both the Arab world
and the West, an attempt to reflect the growing political antagonism of the domestic, national,
and international politics prior to Asya leaving Egypt, which highlights the deteriorating state of
the Mezzaterra, the space that Asya will no longer find upon her return to Egypt after five years
of absence. Asya witnesses the decline of the Nasserite era and the decline of the concept of panArabism, which was inclusive of all Arabs of different racial, social, and national backgrounds.
Also, the decline of stable relationships between Egypt and the West, especially after the 1967
war, and the rise of Islamism that becomes publically inimical to the West—a fact that directly
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contributes to the decline of this ―common ground‖ Asya once enjoyed. Also, the PalestinianIsraeli conflict is one of the major factors that gives rise to a growing public inimical attitude
toward the West. It is important to note that Soueif narrates these political developments as a
background to the development of Asya‘s personal life to reflect the way Asya will have to deal
with the effect politics has on the social values she was brought up with. At a certain point, Asya
will have to negotiate her hybridized identity, which has become strongly grounded in England,
with the new Egypt she returns to live in.
To a certain degree, Mezzaterra is a space that can be seen as parallel to the concept of
the ―third space‖ postcolonial subjects can possibly inhabit upon encountering the culture of their
colonizers. This space remains ―in-between the designations of identity,‖ where ―this interstitial
passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that
entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy‖ (Bhabha 4). The basic
characteristic of Soueif‘s Mezzaterra, which Asya inhabits among the elites in Egyptian society,
is that it does not allow cultural dominance of any sort but rather opens up the opportunity for a
free exchange of traditions and knowledge. However, it is important to note that Mezzaterra is
not only a space to celebrate naively the exchange of traditions, culture, and knowledge between
Egypt and the West, disregarding power and political relations between the two territories.
Asya‘s mother, who is considered part of the generation that helped ground the mezzaterra in
Cairo while fighting British imperialism, has studied English literature despite her ―rejection of
British imperialism‖ (Mezzaterra 6). Just like other members of her generation in the 1950s,
Asya‘s mother believed that the only way to fully appreciate English literature was when
political dominance was diminished, which would allow a level of trust between the culture and
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the people of those territories so that they could engage in unbiased consumption of the literary
production on common grounds (6).
It is Mezzaterra of Asya‘s social class in Egypt that provides the stepping stone for
Asya‘s identity formation. Instead of Asya privileging one side of her identity, she negotiates the
construction of a unique hybrid self. Interestingly, even when Asya moves away from Egypt, the
way she receives her new experiences in the West is negotiated through the hybridized
subjectivity she already possesses. Asya does not experience England, Italy, or the United States
as foreign spaces that alienate her rather, she negotiates the myriad opportunities these spaces
offer her, engaging in a constant act of self construction and reconstruction of identity. In his
article, ―The Anglo-Arab Encounter,‖ Edward Said hails the successful way Soueif manages to
represent Asya‘s hybrid experience:
Soueif does not in the end fall for the East versus West, or Arab versus European,
formulas. Instead, she works them out patiently, and then goes with Asya, who is neither
fully one thing nor another, at least so far as ideologies of that sort are concerned. Soueif
renders the experience of crossing over from one side to the other, and then back again,
indefinitely, without rancor or preachiness. Because Asya is so securely Arab and
Muslim, she does not need to make an issue of it. The fine thing, though, is that Soueif
can present such a hegira as Asya‘s in English, thereby showing that what has become
almost formulaic to the Arab (as well as Western) discourse of the Other need not always
be the case. In fact, there can be generosity, and vision, and overcoming barriers, and,
finally, human existential integrity. (Said 410)
Soueif explores the identity of Asya not as a binary construction in which there remains a clear
divide between her East and West experience. Rather, it is Asya‘s hybrid experience that pushes
her into pursuing her individual need to construct a subjectivity she feels most comfortable and
satisfied with. Throughout the narrative, Asya does not privilege one particular social experience
over the other nor does she get overburdened by the imbalance of the historical and political
relationship between England and Egypt. On the contrary, if anything, Asya‘s experience in both
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Egypt and the West involves paradoxes that she does not necessarily attempt to resolve, but
rather embodies, engages, and negotiates as part of her identity formation and growing maturity.
The existence of these paradoxes in Asya‘s identity affirms her affiliation to both cultures she
experiences: she ―reads the ‗West‘ from an ‗Eastern‘ perspective and she sees the East through
‗Western‘ eyes,‖ attempting to incorporate those paradoxes as part of her identity (Malak 132).
Asya‘s resolution regarding her authentic existence as a complex hybrid will affirm the words of
her literature teacher at Cairo University, who explains the function of employing a paradox as a
figure of speech: ―The paradox is sometimes the only way to express the truth‖ (Soueif 109).
Thus, when Asya decides at the end of the narrative to return to Egypt, she embraces the
paradoxes of her experience in both places and affirms her connection to her identity as both
Arab Egyptian and English, accepting her hybridized multilayered experiences that are intrinsic
parts of her subjectivity.
The Mezzaterra Soueif sets Asya‘s initial experience in is a space that allows the
flourishing of a hybridized identity, where Soueif maintains that ―as the Eighties rolled into the
Nineties the political direction the world was taking seemed to undermine every aspect of this
identity‖ (8). Soueif then suggests that writing about Mezzaterra and the hybridized spaces of
interaction between the East and the West should be promoted in order to restore a potential for
an open dialogue that has been undermined by the unbalanced political order of the present.
Thus, as a writer promoting the common ground of cultural interaction and the representation of
hybridized identities, In the Eye of the Sun could be read as an exercise of writing back to those
who undermine such hybridized experience or misrepresent it. Similar to Soueif‘s writing about
the importance of representing this hybridized space in literature, Bhabha also encouraged
literary representation of this hybridized space, an attempt to open ―the way to conceptualizing
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an international culture, based on the inscription and articulation of a culture‘s hybridity‖ (312).
In an interview with Jonathan Rutherford, Bhabha explains what the third space can offer a
hybridized identity: ―For me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original
moments from which the third emerges; rather, hybridity to me is the ‗Third Space,‘ which
enables other positions to emerge‖ (211). The ―third space‖ is ―interruptive, interrogative, and
enunciative‖ (3). It is the imaginative space that is in a constant state of articulation, which due
to its unfixed nature blurs the limitations of existing boundaries and calls into question
established categories of culture and identity. Also, according to Bhabha, this ―third space‖ is an
ambivalent site where cultural meaning and representation have no ―primordial unity or fixity‖
(3). Therefore, the third space leads not only to hybrid cultures, but also to hybrid identities. In
addition, ―the third space may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of
enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the
exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation
of culture‘s hybridity‖ (4).
Significantly, prior to Asya‘s travel to Europe, the Mezzaterra she socially and culturally
belonged to offered her a third space within her own homeland, one in which she starts to
conceive herself as a hybrid identity. Furthermore, upon her movement and journeys, this
experience in Mezzaterra is enhanced; Asya‘s encounter with other geographic locations only
enriches her multilayered identity, which has no ―primordial unity or fixity‖ (4), constantly
shifting, transforming, and redefining itself according to her cross-cultural experiences.
In addition, part of Soueif‘s representation of the personal emotional, intellectual, and
sexual growth Asya goes through as an Arab woman, traditionally Muslim yet secular in
worldview, can be considered another way of writing back to the misrepresentation of the Arab
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Muslim woman in literary works and discourse. Asya, a privileged, upper-class, Westerneducated Egyptian woman, does not conform to the stereotypical image of the Arab Muslim
woman in literary discourse. It has been true that the majority of works published in the West
representing the experience of the Arab woman have traditionally focused on highlighting three
particular stereotypical representations: ―She is a victim of gender oppression; the second
portrays her as an escapee of her intrinsically oppressive culture; and the third represents her as
the pawn of Arab male power‖ (Kahf 149).
In her article, ―Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,‖
Chandra Mohanty criticizes Western feminist discourse on women in the so-called Third World,
specifically their reductionist and stereotypical representations of the experience of Arab women
and other women who are considered part of the category ―Third World Women,‖ whom it
represents as a ―homogeneous ‗powerless‘ group often located as implicit victims of particular
socio-economic system‖ (38). She also emphasizes that treating women in the Third World as a
homogeneous category ―appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different
groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks. In doing so it ultimately robs them of
their historical and political agency‖ (39).
Even though Asya is an Arab woman, she defies the stereotypes attached to this identity
and the stereotypical representation of the experience of the Arab Muslim. In this sense, Soueif
represents Asya as a privileged, upper-class, hybrid character, both Arab Egyptian racially and
Western intellectually, engaged in a constant state of negotiation between her Egyptian and
Western experiences, defying any fixed notion of her hybridized identity. The fact that Asya is a
complex hybrid character defies any attempt to be categorized by any homogeneous group or
fixed definition.
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When asked in an interview about Asya‘s identity as an Egyptian woman, Soueif
affirms:
Yes she is [Egyptian], in the sense that I am Egyptian. There are so many hybrids now,
people who are a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The interesting thing is what we
make of it, what kind of hybrid we become and how we feel about it. (Soueif qtd. in
Malak 133)
Asya from the start was intended to represent the experience of a woman who is Arab Egyptian
racially, Muslim by tradition, and English through education and experience. These elements that
form her identity mark her as a hybrid, whose ongoing cross-cultural experiences are constantly
negotiated through both her Arab and English identities. Soueif purposefully focuses on Asya‘s
hybridity, which mirrors her own experience. Edward Said describes the way Soueif represents
hybridity in the text as an authentic identity since she is able to write ―of both England and Egypt
from within, although for her heroine Asya Ulama Egypt is the land of her birth, religion, and
early education, Britain the land of her post-graduate education, maturity, and intimate
expression‖ (407). This dialectic informs the whole novel, where Asya till the end will
demonstrate ―ambivalent affiliations to Arab-Muslim cultural ethos on the one hand and to
acquired European intellectualism on the other‖ (Malak 132). Upon her final return to Egypt,
where she acquires a job as a university professor, Asya continues to express herself as a
hybridized Egyptian woman, since she will never be able to ―undo what the North has done‖
(Soueif qtd. in Malak 132).Moreover, Said considers Ahdaf‘s use of the English language instead
of Arabic to represent her narrative as a natural choice, since ―English serves better when a lot of
the material is, so to speak, English, about being in England, having to do intimately with
English people and so on‖ (407). Nevertheless, Said affirms that In the Eye of the Sun is an
Arabic novel written in English: Asya‘s sensibility remains Egyptian even when and as she
closely identifies with the English side of her character (407).
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In In the Eye of the Sun, hybridity becomes a growing trope the narrative is centered on.
Soueif creates a text that is both Egyptian and English: the cartography of the novel stretches
from Egypt to England when Asya moves to England to complete her graduate studies. It is
through the journeys Asya initiates that her hybridized multilayered identity comes into full play,
where the duality of her Egyptian-English identity remains finally grounded in her mediation and
negotiation of the spaces she occupies at different stages of her life. Her connection to place and
to a geographic location is rooted in her hybridized sense of place, and thus whether located in
England or in Egypt, Asya demonstrates an ambivalent affiliation to place if and once cultural
hybridity is absent from her life. Even toward the end of the narrative, in the epilogue, when she
returns to Egypt and is touring a rural area in a suburb in Cairo, Asya feels displaced and
dislocated as she does not feel that she can fully enact upon her hybridized sense of identity due
to the fact that she feels that the Mezzaterra culture and social space she left behind was
disappearing from the Egyptian public life she returns to.
Hybrid Spaces, Agency, and Identity Formation and Transformation
Toward the end of the novel, Asya travels back from England, where she has acquired
her PhD, to Egypt, where she has recently accepted a job as an English professor at Cairo
University. The Egypt Asya returns to is one that she cannot fully connect with; both it and she
have changed significantly during her absence and dislocation in England, and she feels even
further dislocated and displaced on her return. While teaching at the University of Cairo, Asya
notices how the social life has changed, especially that of the women attending Cairo University.
Teaching a class where the majority of her students are female, Asya is surprised to notice a
radically different female student body than the one that attended the university while she was an
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undergraduate student. In the post-Nasser era and upon the rise of Islamism in public life, Asya
is warned by her sister prior to teaching her first literature class at the university that there will be
change, especially with a great number of female students wearing the hijab, a scene that was not
common at the university in the mid-1960s when she was a student. Prior to lecturing on the first
day of classes, Asya asks her students to write on a piece of paper why they are in a class
studying English Literature. One of the responses she gets is, ―I want to learn the language of my
enemy‖ (754). Surprised by such an answer and in an attempt to engage a dialogue, Asya asks
the veiled girl who identifies the response as hers why she did not think ―there was a
commonality of human experience beyond politics, beyond forms‖ (754). The girl refuses to
answer, leaving Asya confused. After this confrontation, Asya links the student‘s anti-Western
sentiments and her religious practice of wearing the veil to the post-Nassir era that has started to
witness the emergence of Islamists in the public sphere.
Asya‘s confusion regarding the girl‘s response is directly linked to the social class she
belongs to: her family never practiced Islam as a faith. Also, Asya‘s affiliation with English and
English literature stems from her upbringing in a Western-educated family in which her mother
and she have made a conscious decision to be educated in English and specialize in its literature.
Asya fails to see that the student‘s response is linked to a postcolonial discourse that she is not
consciously aware of, since she and her family belong to a social class that has been ―a
replacement of the British,‖ as indicated by ―the decision of Asya and her mother, Lateefa, to
speak English instead of Arabic‖ (Nash 72).
Nash critiques Asya‘s reaction to the rise of Islamism among female students at the
university, claiming that Asya does not understand that the veiled girl identifies more with Islam
than with Western education because she belongs to a different social class from Asya‘s. Also,
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Leila Ahmad criticizes the confrontation Soueif creates between Asya and her female student as
one in which Asya‘s social elitism prevents her from fully understanding the motivation behind
her student‘s outward display of religiosity and her inimical attitude towards the West. Ahmad
criticizes Asya during this encounter on account of her privileged class position saying:
Asya, in a confrontation with veiled university students, is enraged (much as a Western
woman might be) by their veils and their attitudes toward Islam. Asya is of middle-class
background; the Islam of the middle and upper class, an urbane, cosmopolitan, secular or
near-secular Islam, is of course not the only Islam there is. Moreover, it is an Islam that
differs from the Islamic habits and attitudes of other classes. While it is entirely
appropriate for the middle-class heroine to direct a hostile and Western-like gaze toward
the habits, attitudes and political perspectives of other classes, it might have been more
satisfying if the author, as distinct from the heroine, had shown some awareness of
Asya‘s class biases. (6)
Ahmad‘s general assessment is true: Asya judges her female students‘ choice to wear the veil
and their attitude toward the West based on her own class biases and her own personal
experience with the West. In addition, for Asya, the confrontation with these female students is
an unfortunate occurrence, since their convictions conflict directly with the type of hybridity she
adopts, one that is acceptant of others, ―beyond politics, beyond forms‖ (Soueif 754). Nash
highlights that Soueif fails to engage Asya‘s lack of awareness of her own class biases when
judging her female students due to ―Soueif‘s closeness to Asya and her failure to detach herself
from Asya‘s elitism‖ (68). Soueif with this episode tries to emphasize Asya‘s identity
construction as a hybrid humanist Anglo-Arab, traditionally Muslim, secular in worldview, who
experiences the West as an elite, hybrid, cosmopolitan character, not necessarily as a
postcolonial subject acutely aware of unbalanced power relations between the East and West.
Furthermore, Asya stresses the common ground between the two cultures she experiences,
claiming ―for the two cultures an equal weighing‖ (74).
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As Asya feels out of place, dislocated in the Egypt she returns to, she goes through
moments of contemplative reflections over her life:
Home. […] How can one keep up with it all. It is like—like—Asya closes her eyes as she
tries to concentrate, to capture the thought. It is as though the brain were a split screen,
one half examining a frozen frame, a moment where time has stopped, the other vaguely
registering the continuation of the action; storing up the passing frames for closer
inspection later. (763)
This splitting of Asya‘s consciousness in order to make sense of her past, present, and future is
an act that mirrors the splitting of her hybrid sense of identity, where it is difficult for her to
restore the same sense of home that she left and reconcile its image with the experiences she has
gained away from home. Yet, this splitting consciousness and the moving back and forth
between past, present, and future is necessary for Asya so that she can better understand the
―third space‖ that she will continue to occupy, a place that defies any notion of a fixed identity.
In the Egypt she returns to, Asya‘s identity represents the concept of what Bhabha calls ―the
beyond‖:
‗Beyond‘ signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our
intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary—the very act of going beyond—are
unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the ‗present‘ which, in the process of
repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced. The imaginary of spatial distance—to live
somehow beyond the border of our times—throws into relief the temporal, social
differences that interrupt our collusive sense of cultural contemporaneity. The present can
no longer be simply envisaged as a break or a bonding with the past and the future, no
longer a synchronic presence: our proximate self-presence, our public image, comes to be
revealed for its discontinuities, its inequalities, its minorities. Unlike the dead hand of
history that tells the beads of sequential time like a rosary, seeking to establish serial,
causal connections, we are now confronted with what Walter Benjamin describes as the
blasting of a monadic moment from the homogenous course of history, ‗establishing a
conception of the present as the ―time of the now.‖ (4)
Asya recognizes that she occupies the borderline of her own culture, representing the beyond,
where her identity has come to occupy a place not defined by spatial or temporal settings.
Throughout her experiences in the different temporal and spatial settings she inhabits, Asya‘s
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sense of identity has been constructed by her experience of place and the way she translates
herself into those places. During this return to Egypt and upon her witnessing the rise of cultural
Islamism, Asya displays an ambivalent sense of connection to the atmosphere at the University
of Cairo. Even though Islam was a traditional part of Egypt before she left, Asya‘s lack of
affiliation with it upon her return marks her hybrid self; it presents her as displaced, conflicting
with elements within her own culture, establishing her individual, personalized character.
The sense of ambivalence, displacement, and dislocation that Asya struggles with once
back in Egypt is highlighted at the end of the narrative when she comes upon an archeological
site in which a statue of a Pharaonic woman has been revealed. According to the guard at the
site, the statue of the woman appeared suddenly upon excavations taking place on the site. This
statue might have been of a ―dancing girl whom Ramses took fancy to and elevated to a SisterWife‖ (Soueif 785). The guard‘s inability to specifically identify who this statue exactly was of
does not irritate Asya, who guesses, on the basis of the composure of the woman‘s face, that ―her
smile tells of someone who had always known who she was,‖ even if others cannot define her
(786). It is Asya‘s contemplation of this statue and its features that gives her the feeling that this
woman has found her own place in the exact location she was found: ―She has indeed found a
gentle grave; for here she is, delivered back into the sunlight still in complete possession of
herself—of her pride, and of her small, subtle smile‖ (785). Just like this woman, Asya will have
to continue to find her own ―in-between‖ place in which to emerge in full embodiment of her
hybrid experience.
The movement and transportation this statue goes through across different settings, being
dislocated in a spatial-temporal site, does mark her as different. Yet she has found her own place:
her travel across time has landed her exactly in a place she belongs to and where she remains ―in
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complete possession of herself,‖ despite not belonging to the site she appears at in the modern
days. Just like this Pharaonic woman who is out of place, yet defines a place of belonging for
herself, Asya has to learn how to insert her hybrid identity into present-day Egypt, marking a
personal geography that she belongs to regardless of the society surrounding her. From the
beginning of the narrative and even within the boundaries of Egypt, prior to her journeys and
cross-cultural experiences, Asya senses dislocation and displacement because she feels that she
belongs to a different time than the present one she experiences. Yet Asya will have to negotiate
the spatial and temporal settings she occupies at every stage of her life to get to a place where
she is the only one who can carve her own individual, personal identity and construct it in the
theoretical imaginary ―in-between‖ space she claims as her own.
The theme of hybridity underlies Asya‘s life narrative: where she struggles to construct
her own hybrid identity while navigating between the competing cultures and spaces she inhabits
and encounters, mainly Egypt and England. While moving between these two places, Asya
realizes that in order to control the trajectory of her identity formation and to reclaim herself as a
hybrid subject, she will have to address the postcolonial predicament; this entails confronting
traditional Egyptian family authority, male authority, sexual politics, and both Arab traditional
and Western Orientalist stereotyping of the Arab women‘s identity. While moving between East
and West, navigating the tensions that arise in this cross-cultural experience, Asya will
reconstruct her personal hybridized identity and the in-between space that she shapes out of her
experience of the places she visits.
Despite being socio-economically privileged, Asya‘s personal life is defined and
controlled by the people in it and the places she encounters. In order to be able to experience
these places and spaces she inhabits on her own terms, Asya has to learn how to negotiate
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between what is expected of her by the people surrounding her and the choices she will finally
make on her own, reclaiming agency to define her own life.
From the start, Asya‘s life route is defined by the choices her academic parents make for
her. Even though Asya likes literature, it seems that her choice of pursuing a graduate degree in
it to become a professor of literature, just like her parents, is hardly a choice she makes on her
own. After completing her PhD in England, having worked on her dissertation for a long time,
Asya informs her mother Lateefa that she does not want to go back to Egypt right away. Lateefa,
not understanding Asya‘s desire for some ―time on her own,‖ is disappointed with Asya‘s
decision. It seems that Lateefa refuses to comprehend that her daughter has the right to make her
own decisions that do not align with her own. The following conversation between Asya and her
mother reveals the extent to which Lateefa is totally oblivious to Asya‘s need of making her own
decisions:
―I‘ve never ever made a real choice.‖
―All the choices you made were yours.‖
―Yes, but were they real choices? I mean, I was born into a road which had ‗to the
Ph.D.‘ signaled on it; I hardly knew anyone who didn‘t work in the university—I mean, I
don‘t even know that I want to be in the university for the rest of my life.‖
―But what else can you do?‖ Lateefa stares at her daughter.
―I don‘t know. But maybe I can find out.‖
[…]
―But you can‘t just sit around doing nothing.‖
[…]
―Oh Mummy,‖ Asya cries jumping up. ―You‘re going round and round in circles.‖
She stands in the middle of the room. ―I‘ve done what I‘ve been conditioned to want. I‘ve
woken up every morning and done what I already knew I had to do. I want to know what
I would do if I didn‘t have to do anything.‖ (689-690)
Through the use of certain words like ―real,‖ ―choice,‖ and ―conditioned,‖ when discussing the
way her life has unfolded with her mother, Asya stresses that her life choices were not really her
own, but rather they were ones pre-arranged by her family and the social class she was born into,
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and thus she had to assume the prescribed role. The lack of agency in choosing what she
personally wants prevents Asya from being able to fully define her identity and subjectivity.
Also, when Asya suffers from an unfulfilling, unconsummated marriage, she will blame
her parents, who insisted that the marriage be postponed for three years, long after the start of
their romantic relationship. Asya also blames her social class and the traditional culture in Egypt
that demands that romantic relationship not be consummated until marriage. Agency in acting
upon her desires and her life choices is one that Asya gradually will learn how to obtain as she
learns how to give voice to herself and to her identity.
It is no surprise that Asya usually turns to reading novels like Madame Bovary,
Middlemarch, and Anna Karenina when she feels weak, an attempt to connect to the plights of
other female protagonists trying to reclaim unique voices of their own. These novels become
spaces that satisfy Asya‘s hybrid cultural sensibility, since she does not necessarily see any
difference between herself as an Egyptian woman and the Western heroines in the novels she
reads. In addition, the choice of connecting to the plight of Western heroines highlights Asya‘s
identity as a natural hybrid, where her hybrid education and lifestyle makes it natural for her to
search for an agency within the universal experience of other women. Just like the protagonists
in the novels she reads and the Pharaonic woman Asya encounters upon her return to Egypt,
Asya will have to negotiate her life circumstances, the people around her, and the dominant
discourses that define her identity in both Egypt and in England in order to become ―in complete
possession of herself‖ (785).
From the start, what attracted Asya to Saif Madi, the man she falls in love with, marries,
then divorces, is his hybridized manners: he is Western in clothes, manners, and political views;
he looked ―completely different from everybody else‖ (98). His perfect English also allures
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Asya, but what she is not aware of from the start is that Saif will become another person, back in
Egypt, who will silence her and hinder her from emerging as an individual in complete
possession of herself. The relationship between Asya and Saif from the start is one defined by
Asya‘s lack of agency to fully communicate herself and her desires to him, allowing him to
indirectly control her identity. Her development as an independent individual later will start
taking place as she physically moves away from him. Yet, Asya for a long time willingly accepts
that Saif exercise his authority over her by silencing her voice at times and refusing to fulfill her
sexual desires out of a sense of authority.
Saif lies to Asya on several occasions, but Asya accepts these lies without challenging
them out of a sense of weakness. She later regrets this passivity as she learns that challenging
Saif was one of the major achievements prerequisite to her emergence as an independent
individual. When Saif describes his lifestyle and mother to Asya, he gives her a sense that his
mother is a modern woman with a trendy hairstyle, just like her own, who lives a certain Western
lifestyle. Upon visiting Saif‘s home in a rural part of Egypt not far from Cairo, Asya is shocked
to discover that his mother looks totally opposite to what he has described. Asya, who is annoyed
by Saif‘s lie, does not challenge him, even as she is certain he knows that she is aware that he has
lied to her. Asya‘s silence allows Saif to further exploit her by uttering more lies, expecting her
to leave his authority unchallenged.
Saif also unashamedly lies to Asya when he tells his British friends, Nicola and Leon, a
twisted story about how he and Asya met and fell in love. While Asya and Saif first meet at
Cairo University, where they are instantly attracted to one another, Saif relates a story of how he
meets Asya after she is wounded during a demonstration they are both participating in against
the Egyptian government. While Nicola exclaims that she thinks Asya‘s too brave to go out on a
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demonstration, whereas Nicola would be terrified by the thought of being in Asya‘s shoes, Asya
goes along with the lie in a ―voice sounding artificial and strained‖ (186). Internally, Asya is
confused by the lie Saif tells, since she actually has never been allowed to participate in any of
the recent demonstrations taking place in the streets of Cairo because her parents and Saif
together disapprove of them, claiming that they are ―absurd, pointless, [and …] change nothing‖
(187). Despite her awareness of Saif‘s lies, Asya is not able to ―ask him afterwards‖ when they
are both together alone and question his retelling of the story of their meeting (187). By not
challenging Saif‘s lies, Asya accepts that her story about their meeting be silenced. Moreover,
Asya‘s lack of voice and agency to talk for herself prevents her from emerging and connecting to
an identity that she is in full control of. Asya will have to go through a process whereby she
gains agency to speak for herself, control her life, and define her own sense of identity and place
in a world of her own construction.
Conversely, Saif controls Asya‘s expression of her emotions and sexual intimacy in an
attempt to demonstrate his authority over her. During their engagement, Asya offers herself
several times to Saif but he refuses to consummate their relationship, claiming that social and
traditional codes require an unmarried woman to remain a virgin. Yet, after their marriage, Saif
will continue to refuse to consummate their marriage, leaving Asya in a state of confusion. The
following scene is typical of probably every scene in which Asya and Saif are intimate. It
highlights Asya‘s lack of agency even when it comes to acting upon her sexual desires with Saif
after their marriage. While they are in bed, Asya offers herself to him:
―Darling,‖ she whispers, ―darling, you know—if you want—it‘s really alright. I‘m not
afraid or anything.‖
He lifts his head. ―What are you talking about Princess?‖
―If you want to, you know, make love properly‖— she moves still closer to him—
―then that‘s alright. I love you.‖
―I love you too, Princess.‖
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―Well?‖
―No—no.‖ He looks into her eyes. ―It wouldn‘t be a good idea.‖
―Oh! Well, OK.‖
[…].
―Hush,‖ he bends his head and kisses her. (139)
This scene takes place in Beirut, Lebanon, after both Saif and Asya decide to meet secretly away
from Egypt. Both Asya and Saif have decided that they will consummate their relationship in
Beirut, yet Saif decides to hold back because he thinks ―it wouldn‘t be a good idea‖ and out of an
assumed position of offering protection to Asya. Yet, Asya offers herself explicitly while Saif
interrupts her, and she‘s left without being able to express herself fully. Saif‘s refusal to have
intercourse with Asya in this scene will be replicated even after their marriage in other places
they visit and while they‘re in Egypt and in England, leaving Asya‘s desires unfulfilled. Asya,
who refrains from expressing her lack of sexual satisfaction to Saif every time they are intimate,
will later engage in an affair with an Englishman after moving to England to pursue her PhD. He
will satisfy her sexually for a short time, yet leave her emotionally empty. It is important to note
that Asya‘s affair with the Englishman, Gerald Stone, is not one she seeks to be liberated
sexually from cultural constraints in Egypt; rather, Asya searches for the emotional and sexual
satisfaction that Saif does not provide her; she finds it in her relationship with Gerald.
However, the affair ends when Asya discovers that Gerald Stone is obsessed with her
body out of an Orientalist fixation: he enjoys fetishizing the sexuality and bodies of Third World
women. Even though Asya will regret this relationship, it will become one of the learning
experiences that her hybridized identity negotiates and confronts as she translates herself into the
English landscape.
Nash offers a flawed reading of Asya‘s sexuality and its relationship to her cultural
background:
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Although she is a Muslim, Asya‘s privileged background enables her to indulge in sexual
experimentation covertly in her own land, and more freely in Switzerland, where she
travels as a student, and in Beirut, Damascus and London, in the company of her fiancé,
Saif. Asya‘s premarital intimacy with Saif stops short of complete sexual congress, and
once the pair have accomplished the traditional marriage ritual, they find themselves
unable to consummate their union, even though Saif is neither impotent, nor Asya frigid.
From Asya‘s point of view, her relationship with Saif (who is unable to accept her on her
own terms) seems to represent the limitations of her cultural inheritance, and the need to
go beyond this finds expression in her search for emotional and sexual fulfillment with
European men. (70)
Nash misreads Asya‘s unfulfilling sexual experimentation with Saif in Egypt and her search for
fulfillment with an Englishman as a representation of the ―limitations of her cultural
inheritance,‖ as opposed to the sexual liberation England will offer her. However, from the very
start of her sexual experimentation, Asya‘s body has sexual and emotional desires that are not
satisfied in her relationship with her husband. She has an affair with Gerald Stone not because
England is a place of sexual liberation for her, but rather simply because she finds fulfillment in
her affair with Gerald, despite his nationality. Nash‘s insistence on reading Asya‘s sexual quest
as one in which she associates sexual repression with Egypt and sexual liberation with England
is a misreading of her hybridized identity. In fact, Asya translates herself emotionally and
sexually with Gerald in order to speak her desires and express herself, something she is not able
to do with Saif. Engaging in the affair is an attempt by Asya to reclaim an agency and a voice
with which she is able to express her desires and have them fulfilled. In fact, as her relationship
with Gerald starts, Asya uses the physical fulfillment it offers her to rationalize it:
Why not? Why not ―baby‖ and ―babe‖ and ―honey‖ and ―sugar‖? Why should she
always be ―sweetie‖ and ―princess,‖ and never this, never be kissed and caressed and
undressed and looked at and admired? (539)
As opposed to the type of unfulfilling sexual relationship Asya has with Saif, this affair she
enters with Gerald provides her with both emotional and sexual satisfaction:
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And what am I doing? Why am I in this? I‘m in this because I wanted him to stay one
night. And because he made me feel physical again. And because it was a complete
novelty to be with a man who wanted to talk and who—I thought—wanted to listen;
someone who actually made demands on me—and not just that I should leave him alone.
Someone who actually wanted me—needed to make love to me. (592)
It is the lack of emotional and sexual fulfillment with Saif that drives Asya to engage in this
affair with Gerald Stone. Saif never considers Asya‘s emotions and needs, and thus she decides
to find this fulfillment elsewhere.
After Asya engages in the affair with Gerald, she discovers that she has become an
Orientalist fantasy for him. At a certain point, Asya will disengage from Gerald, refusing to have
her agency reduced to an Orientalist stereotype.
―Could we—please—at least switch off the light?‖ she says.―No.‖ He shakes his head.
He pulls her head round by the hair and holds it so that she has to look into the mirror.
―Look at you. I never want you to get dressed when we‘re married. Be like this for me,
babe: naked and perfumed, your hair falling over your shoulders, wearing only your
jewels—‖
[…]
―An odalisque you want?‖ she smiles.
―A what?‖
―A concubine. A female slave.‖
[…]
―I‘m the one who‘s the slave, your slave, my beautiful, beautiful Eastern
butterfly.‖ (563)
Asya realizes that Gerald‘s relationship with her comes out of his obsession and Orientalist
fixation on the figure of the exotic, sexual, Arab woman. This fantasy is one that Asya will have
to confront as Gerald‘s fantasy becomes an obsession. The Orientalist trope that Soueif brings
into the narrative while Asya is in England is part of the wider Orientalist-Western discourse that
Asya has to engage, negotiate, and finally deconstruct in order to reclaim a hybridized identity
defined by her own translation of self into place. It is imperative to note that part of Asya‘s
cross-cultural, Anglo-Arab encounter that grounds her hybrid subjectivity is that she is put in
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trials where she will have to navigate her identity away from discourses that reduce her agency
and subjectivity to a stereotype.
Finally, when Asya is fed up with Gerald‘s reductionist fantasies of her identity, she
confronts him in an attempt to deconstruct his Western gaze towards her and all the other Third
World women he has dated:
―Gerald,‖ Asya says quietly, ―why have all your girl-friends been from ‗developing‘
countries?‖
―What?‖
―You‘ve never had a white girl-friend, why?‖
―I don‘t think that way, man.‖
―Yes, you do—and the reason you‘ve gone for Trinidad—Vietnam—Egypt—is so
you can feel superior. You can be the big white boss—you are a sexual imperialist— […]
You‘ve pushed me and pushed me and pushed me and pushed me and I‘ve had it. I hate
it. I hate people who go around trying to change people. The hypocrisy of it. […] I know
you better than you know yourself— […] shit—what you mean is that the way you think
I should be is better for you than the way I am. Well, I‘ve had it—‖ (723)
While this argument between Asya and Gerald reveals how aware Asya becomes of her subject
position, she will no longer accept under any circumstance to be defined by Gerald according to
his narrow Orientalist assumptions. It also marks an important moment in her reclamation of her
own identity, refusing any external, fixed notions and misconceptions of who she is. Asya totally
rejects the way Gerald and even the wider Western Orientalist discourses construct her image,
which is an important step she takes towards emerging as a hybrid identity of her own
construction. It is upon her return to Egypt that the novel marks a full cycle, where Asya learns
how to reclaim a voice, an authority over her own life, and an identity that embraces the
paradoxes of a hybrid experience.
Throughout the narrative, Soueif plunges Asya into experiences where she has to stand
for herself, voice her desires, and reject being manipulated by the people in her life, whether her
mother, Saif, or Gerald, all of whom assume authoritative voices over her own. Also, Asya faces
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dominant stereotypical discourses that define her identity in both England and Egypt, which she
does not succumb to but rather refutes and deconstructs in order to construct her own hybrid
identity. Asya‘s ability to speak out of the position of her hybrid experiences frees her from the
authoritative control of any person, any discourse, or any place over her identity. Thus, Asya‘s
journeys to reclaim her voice, satisfy her personal desires, and claim a hybrid identity of her own
construction is one that is not limited to a certain space that will either oppress her or liberate
her. Throughout her physical journey from Egypt to England, then back to Egypt once more,
Asya will continue to learn and develop as a hybrid Anglo-Arab woman who frees herself from
people, places, and discourses that attempt to limit her agency in determining her own personal
identity. Asya‘s final encounter with the lone statue of the Pharaonic woman who has gone
through a temporal journey from the era of Ramses II to modern-day Egypt teaches her how to
define a space that encompasses her hybrid identity. Despite her temporal dislocation, this lonely
woman statue appears ―in complete possession of herself,‖ which makes Asya realize that
reclaiming her agency and sense of authority over her own body, destiny, and hybrid identity
becomes the only way to be in ―complete possession of herself‖; she gains this personal authority
through the trials of her physical, psychological, and emotional journeys.
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CHAPTER THREE
The Personal Reconstructive Journey Narrative: Displacement, Religion, and Worldview
in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Minaret
Introduction
In her two novels, The Translator (1999) and Minaret (2006), Leila Aboulela uses the
trope of journey, both spiritual and physical, to trace the process of identity transformation her
Sudanese female protagonists, Sammar and Najwa, go through while (dis)placed in the West,
London and Scotland, respectively. These female characters are both represented in a way that
their Islamic religious and spiritual identity is (re)constructed upon experiencing cross-cultural
encounters and conflicts, where the host lands become the sites of their individual and Islamic
spiritual awakening. Constructing London and Scotland as contact zones in which an Islamic
identity becomes more grounded for these female protagonists is significant because it allows
them to personally and independently negotiate their own ways of experiencing the West, their
Islamic faith, and their gendered identities. Through close analytical reading of the two novels,
this chapter focuses on how the journeys (back and forth between Sudan and Europe) undertaken
by the female protagonists allow identity negotiation, cultural translation, and spiritual
(re)construction upon geographies that are originally considered diasporic sites of displacement
for the protagonists.
Analyzing the novels according to cooke‘s concept of the ―Muslimwoman‖–the idea in
the post–9/11 era, especially in the West, that faith and gender are the most salient features of the
Muslim woman‘s identity—I argue that Aboulela‘s female protagonists challenge any
essentialist and reductionist labeling of their characters, even when they finally assume a
gendered, Islamic faith–based identity. Both Sammar and Najwa represent and refute the concept
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of the Muslimwoman: they derive agency from their journeys and their experiences—which are
cross-cultural and diverse, yet individual and nuanced—without having totally to assimilate to
and be consumed by either Western culture, through adopting a secular worldview, nor by
Sudanese Islamic traditional culture. ―Instead of having Islam as part of the culture, I am
consciously presenting it as a faith‖ (Aboulela qtd. Chambers 94). Thus Sammar and Najwa
experience their religious identity as part of their gendered cross-cultural experience as women
in Scotland and London, where they constantly negotiate between a secular worldview and an
Islamic one based on an increasing sense of faith. Moreover, Aboulela‘s novels are part of a
body of literature by and about Arab women that is concerned with balancing the representation
of Arab Muslim women‘s experiences and claims for their individual personal identities.
The Muslim Woman in Aboulela’s Novels
In her article, ―The Muslimwoman,‖ miriam cooke coins the term Muslimwoman by
combining two aspects of identity, religion and gender, components which have been the
highlights of the Muslim woman‘s identity to both neo-orientalist and Muslim fundamentalists in
a post-11/9 era. cooke describes how and why she came up with the label Muslimwoman:
In the 6 years that have elapsed since the events of 9/11 Muslims have become the Other
and veiled Muslim women have become their visible representatives. Standing in for
their communities, they have attracted international media attention. So intertwined are
gender and religion that they have become one. I have coined the term the Muslimwoman
to describe this erasure of diversity. Some women reject this label. Others us it to
empower themselves and even to subvert the identification. In the process they are
constructing a new kind of cosmopolitanism. (139)
cooke argues that Muslimwoman is an essentializing identity that erases diversity and difference
among Muslim women, an identity that has been ascribed to them whether they accept it,
challenge it, or refuse it all together: ―The Muslimwoman is both a noun and an adjective that
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refers to an imposed identification the individual may or may not choose for herself. The
Muslimwoman is not a description of a reality; it is the ascription of a label that reduces all
diversity to a single image‖ (cooke 140). Because the term Muslimwoman is a label ascribed to a
group of women who have not chosen to be reduced to a gendered and religious identity, Muslim
women find themselves navigating this fused identity and often rejecting it, even when
participating in the growing debate about the Muslim woman. Thus, Muslim women writers, just
like Muslim women operating in other fields of discourse and representation, have found
themselves challenging this identity marker while sometimes representing it in their literary
writings in a way that allows them to refute its legitimacy, challenging the orientalist, neoorientalist, and radical Islamic discourses, all of which historically participated in validating this
construction about Muslim women. And because the label Muslimwoman is not a description of
the reality of the identity of Muslim women, but rather an imposed identity, it is important to
note that addressing this limited identification does not reduce the agency of Muslim women
writers or their literary representations. At times, when treating literary representation of the
Muslimwoman, more Muslim women are presenting it as a site of empowerment against neocolonial powers and patriarchal Islamic authoritative powers, both of which have been the main
players in creating this identity and the meanings attached to it. The label Muslimwoman
becomes a site where Muslim women can speak out, refuse, and challenge any imposed
representation of what constitutes their identities (Badran 102). Thus, as varied and
individualistic as they are, Muslim women writers in the varied fields of representation are aware
of how to position themselves and their literary writings when engaging the Muslimwoman
identity in their writings.
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In literary representation, Muslim women writers have created empowered female
characters who have engaged this label in varied ways to represent the experience of the Muslim
woman; characters loaded with conflicts and nuanced complexities that are connected directly to
their Arab-Islamic religious and gendered experiences. While Ahdaf Soueif‘s works have Arab
Muslim women characters in her novels, she undermines the Muslim identification of her
characters who don‘t define themselves within the limiting boundaries of this identification; yet,
Leila Aboulela represents the Muslimwoman in her novels. Soueif, as discussed in my previous
chapter, grounds her female protagonists‘ displacement in a hybridized secular Arab-Western
agency neglecting the religious identification, while Aboulela grounds her female protagonists‘
dislocation in an Islam-based experience that articulates the different possibilities of the Arab
women‘s cross-cultural experience. Commenting on the different ways Soueif and Aboulela
articulate the experience of the Arab woman with Muslim roots, Geoffrey Nash says,
Soueif‘s writing remains inimical to dialogue with contemporary Islamist thinking while
Aboulela‘s evidently does not. They are at variance in the ways they address postcolonial and post-modern predicaments of East and West. Soueif mediates the conflicting
divide in the name of a humanizing awareness of the value and space of women. By its
assertion of depth, Aboulela‘s text refutes deconstructionist dogmas of absence, and
draws Western emptiness into a rooted Islamic-African core. Both writers inject a nondidactic assurance into their discourse, in the process sign-posting the potential for
Muslim women to delimit the boundaries of post-colonial discourse according to their
own terms. (31)
Despite the different representations of the Arab Muslim woman experience in the West, whether
engaging a secular or a religious experience, both writers participate in the dialogue and debate
on the Muslimwoman. It is through literary representation that these writers foreground the
varied ways the Muslimwoman approaches her cross-cultural experience, which is basically
marked by the protagonists‘ heterogeneity, diversity, and individualism. In this chapter, I analyze
how Aboulela‘s novels work through the gendered and religious component of the
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Muslimwoman label in a way that engages the intersection of these components with European
values and culture, creating an identity that is multi-dimensional and cross-cultural with an
Islamic facet.
Furthermore, cooke takes the concept of the Muslimwoman a step further by proposing
that ―Muslim women are today‘s new cosmopolitans‖ (152). She explains that Muslim women in
this globalized era connect with one another to disrupt and destabilize the roles they are expected
to play or represent. These women negotiate the stereotypes and identities ascribed to them
through presenting and representing the multiple articulations of Muslim women‘s diverse,
nuanced experiences, which destabilize the homogeneous notions ascribed to the Muslimwoman.
Muslimwoman cosmopolitanism materializes when Muslim women keep the category
Muslimwoman an unsettling site of identity articulation by negotiating the borders and spaces of
their religious and gendered identities, in addition to accepting and embracing the very
differences that it possibly encompasses. Also, the concept of cosmopolitanism is based on the
premise that despite one‘s rootedness in a specific location, connections across borders must also
include ―receptiveness to difference that might instruct and perhaps transform‖ (152). It is highly
significant that a true Muslimwoman cosmopolitanism flourishes where Muslim women display
a true sense of commitment toward one another and toward the multiple and varied selfexpressions they both articulate and propose.
Being an Anglo-Arab woman concerned with Arab Muslim women literary
representations in the post–9/11 era, just like other contemporary Arab woman writers, Aboulela
is part of the Muslimwoman cosmopolitan group. Having been born in Egypt, raised in Sudan,
where she studied at the Khartoum American School, and spent several years living in both
Scotland and England. Her writings have been considered by critics part of the growing
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Anglophone Arab literary corpus, and thus, naturally, they have started gaining special attention
since 9/11. In her Book, Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab
Literature,‖ Layla Al Maleh asserts that even though Anglophone Arab literature dates back to
the turn of the twentieth century, it ―did not gain attention or attain recognition until the world
woke up one day to the horror of the infamous 9/11 and asked itself who those Arabs really
were‖ (1), the special attention that it has been given is due mainly to the prominence of the
Muslimwoman category in mainstream neo-orientalist discourse since 9/11. These political
conditions made the works of Anglo-Arab women writers, such as Aboulela, gain attention and
readership. From the beginning of her writing career and with the publication of her first novel
The Translator in 1999, Aboulela has displayed an acute sense of the importance of representing
the experience of Muslim women in literary narrative. She engages themes concerning the
Muslimwoman experience even prior to the events of 9/11, addressing issues related to the EastWest encounter, displacement, acculturation, cultural translation, and faith. Wail Hassan locates
Aboulela‘s writings as a descendent to Tayib Salih‘s writings and other diasporic writers who
wrote about the immigrant experience to the North prior to her contemporary generation of
writers:
Aboulela‘s fiction depicts those unsuspected spaces in the Britain that did not exist in the
1950s and 1960s when Salih penned his early short stories and his widely read novel,
Season of Migration to the North (1966). Her work represents two historical
developments since the 1970s: the Islamic resurgence that has attempted to fill the void
left by the failure of Arab secular ideologies of modernity (something that Salih‘s fiction
as a whole dramatizes)‘ and the growth of immigrant Muslim minorities in Europe and
the United States. (298)
It is true that Aboulela‘s writings, including The Translator and Minaret, address the experience
of diasporic subjects after the ―Islamic resurgence‖ that is being represented in literature.
Whether identifying with it or refusing it, Aboulela‘s writings remain individualistic
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representations of the Arab Muslim woman‘s experience without being ideological, squeezed
between the secular and Islamic worldview. What characterizes her writings is that they are
concerned with the individual experience of the diasporic Arab woman subject and the way she
negotiates this identity with the European settings she encounters. ―What her fictional project
accomplishes is the articulation in English fiction of an immigrant Muslim woman‘s worldview‖
(3).
While Aboulela‘s novels represent the specific gendered journey of her Sudanese female
protagonists, Sammar and Najwa, from the South to the North, several literary critics, such as
Geoffrey Nash, Ghazoul, and Wail Hassan, have highlighted the ways in which Aboulela‘s
representation of journey from the South to the North have been influenced by Tayeb Salih‘s
novel, Season of Migration to the North. Wail Hassan analyzes the ways in which Aboulela‘s
fictional project builds on, departs from, and contradicts the predicaments made by Salih when
representing the North/Southxxviii encounter:
[Aboulela] rewrites Tayeb Salih‘s rewriting of Joseph Conrad, but while moving away
from the (post)colonial dialectic of ―writing back,‖ which has so far served as the primary
paradigm of postcolonial African narrative. In effect, Aboulela‘s fiction represents an
attempt not so much to reverse, rewrite, or answer back to colonial discourse, but to
achieve an epistemological break with it. What Aboulela‘s fiction represents, in one
sense, is the possibility ―to join South to North under the emblem of a universal quest,
that of Islamic humanism (Ghazoul).‖ (299)
It is true that Aboulela is highly influenced by Tayeb Salih‘s works: the intertextuality and
literary allusions to Salih‘s works, specifically Season of Migration to the North attests to
thatxxix. Also, just like Salih, Aboulela represents the journey from the South to the North and the
dilemmas postcolonial protagonists deal with when located in empire. Yet, the gendering of her
narratives as female marks a break with Salih‘s work. Aboulela is not necessarily interested in
representing the clash between North and South, the colonizer and the colonized, and the
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violence that occurs in such an aggressive encounter. On the contrary, despite the awareness of
the colonial history between the two places, England and Sudan, Aboulela‘s novels are highly
gendered and personalized: we closely follow the individual geographic, psychological,
emotional, and spiritual journeys her female protagonists go through while attempting to find a
stable sense of belonging and home in England or Scotland, where they relocate to. Thus, in
reading Aboulela‘s novels and because the novels almost exclusively represent her female
protagonists‘ personal life development, it remains impossible to reduce their nuanced
experiences as representations of specific postcolonial discourses and ideological projects.
Aboulela‘s novels are personal gendered narratives that address the complexity of the experience
of Muslim Arab women in diasporic locations.
In The Translator, Aboulela‘s protagonist, Sammar, is a Sudanese woman who travels to
Aberdeen, Scotland, in order to work as a translator for a professor in the Middle Eastern
Department at a university there. Throughout her journey, Sammar not only translates texts, but
also engages in translating the places, spaces, and people she encounters into a familiar language
and metaphor that relates them to her home, Khartoum, Sudan. While living in Aberdeen,
Sammar constantly negotiates between her identity as an independent Muslimwoman with a firm
Islamic worldview and the Western gaze toward her that reduces her to a Muslimwoman with a
singular subjectivity. However, she manages to make Aberdeen a contact zone in which she does
not have to compromise her values as a practicing Muslim woman, but rather engages the
nuanced complexities of living as a Muslimwoman in the West.
Similarly, Najwa, the protagonist in Minaret, engages the Muslimwoman identity while
negotiating her gender, sexuality, and awakening Islamic faith during her exile in Britain. Najwa,
who was born into an upper-middle-class, liberal, secular, Westernized family back in Khartoum,
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finds herself replacing those values with a more conservative, humble, and Islamic lifestyle
while displaced in Britain. By displacing Najwa‘s religious identity in the West while taking her
through a cross-cultural experience, Aboulela addresses the theme of religious negotiation that is
part of the Muslimwoman experience. In both her novels Aboulela addresses the experience of
the Muslimwoman as a diasporic subject who is constantly engaging identity negotiation,
cultural translation, counteracculturation, and faith, creating their individual, personal
geographies within foreign spaces they construct as personal empowering sites.
It is important to note that while Aboulela valorizes the Muslimwoman identification
through the representation of her protagonists, it remains a problematic identification that could
be misread as an essentializing identification by competing Orientalist and Islamic
fundamentalist discourses on Muslim women. Using the Muslimwoman term as a means to
representing the Muslim woman experience limits Muslim women‘s agency to locate their
―sense of subjectivity and identity outside the parameters that have been determined for [them]‖
(Zine 110).It is important to identify the different ways the Muslimwoman identification could
be limiting for women who don‘t identity with the label and refute it all together as a leading
feature of their identity and subjectivity. Yet, there are some women whom the Muslimwoman
identification provides them with social mobility, a fact that provides them with agency and
empowerment. This divide between those who benefit from the Muslimwoman identification and
those whom are limited by it is one that should be emphasized when discussing the Muslim
woman experience or representing it in literary narratives. In her novels, Aboulela valorizes the
Muslimwoman identification not as an essentializing identity marker but as one that provides her
female protagonists with a means of individual mobility, empowerment, and agency.
The Translator: Translating Place, Religion and the Self
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The Translator involves multiple journeys the female protagonist, Sammar, undertakes
between Sudan (South) and Scotland (North), the two most important being when Sammar
travels with her husband, Tarig, to Aberdeen in pursuit of his medical degree, and the second
when she moves to Aberdeen to be a translator between Arabic and English for a professor of
Middle Eastern history and politics, Rae Isles, with whom she falls in love during the course of
the novel. The first journey is interrupted shortly after her husband is killed in a car accident,
forcing her to return back to Khartoum with her baby son, Amir. The second is interrupted when
she decides to return to Khartoum upon her failed romantic relationship with Rae. We learn
about the first journey through a series of flashbacks that come to Sammar during her second
journey. The conflation of the two journeys, both spatial and temporal, is important to Sammar:
first, she is able to heal from the oppressiveness of the grief and depression the first journey
plunged her into along with the oppressiveness of certain elements of Sudanese culture, such as
the suppressing power of her mother-in-law (who is also her aunt). Second, she is able to engage
a healthy and balanced cross-cultural experience with the West and North, where her religious
and Islamic spiritual identity becomes the site of her cross-cultural negotiation.
The trope of journeying back and forth between Sudan and Scotland, which parallels the
trope of translating texts from Arabic to English, serves as a motif for the constant engagement
of the diasporic subject, Sammar, with home, Khartoum, and the other geography, Aberdeen, and
her careful negotiation of her gendered, emotional, and Islamic religious identity. Journey allows
Sammar to finally map her personal geography and inscribe her religious and spiritual worldview
on it despite her geographic location. Also, the trope of translation serves as a motif for the
linguistic, cultural, and religious self-transfer and transition into a ―self-constituting landscape of
faith, diaspora and identity‖ (Ball 119). Thus, through the trope of translating both of her
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protagonist‘s journeys, physical and spiritual, Aboulela presents a reconstructive image of the
Muslimwoman, whose experience asserts the individuality and uniqueness of her identity and
subjectivity.
“Home” Is Where the “Heart” Is?
―Ours is not a religion of suffering,‖ he said, ―nor is it tied to a particular place.‖
(Aboulela 198)
The Translator closes soon after these lines are spoken by Rae Isles, Sammar‘s boss and
husband-to-be, after his conversion to Islam. Upon arriving to Khartoum to propose to Sammar
and to ask that she return to Aberdeen with him, Rae brings up the most essential theme the
novel articulates: faith is not tied to a specific geographic place. Rae realizes this upon the
personal spiritual journey he undertakes while located in Scotland, where he finally takes on the
decision to convert to Islam. Prior to this, Rae undertakes a trip to Morocco, and he has made
several visits to Egypt to advance his research in Middle Eastern politics and history. However,
his conversion to Islam takes him to Khartoum to propose marriage to Sammar, where they plan
their future journey back to Aberdeen, experiencing a sense of belonging to a shared religious
identity wherever they settle. Likewise, throughout the multiple journeys she undertakes between
the South and the North, Sammar constantly searches for a landscape to translate her selfhood,
emotions, faith, and identity—a place of belonging. As they unfold, Sammar‘s journeys in reality
(dis)locate and fragment her identity until she experiences the collapse of the here, Khartoum,
and there, Aberdeen, into one, mapping her spiritual and religious geography, which is detached
from any specific physical geographic place. The feelings of alienation and fragmentation that
accompany the condition of physical displacement Sammar experiences both in Khartoum and in
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Aberdeen are overcome eventually when she matures spiritually, and only then do ―[a]ll the
splinters inside her com[e] together‖ (Aboulela 66). This reintegration of a self and identity that
happens once Sammar experiences movement from one place to another implies that her spiritual
journey informs her identity and constitutes its core.
From the outset, the title of the novel, The Translator, implies the act of translation that
entails movement, in the sense of transferring text from one language to another. However,
throughout the narrative, the act of translation as transfer and movement projects itself as three
types of movement.The first is physical movement from one geographic place to another, in the
case of the novel Sammar‘s movement from the South, Khartoum, to the North, Aberdeen, then
her return trip back to the South. This physical movement follows Sammar‘s journey from
Khartoum to Aberdeen, engaging in the act of constantly translating her home, culture, faith, and
identity into the new place, while trying to translate the new place into a familiar territory she
could connect to.
This leads to the second type of movement, which actually was the trigger for her spatial
movement: the linguistic translation of texts from Arabic to English. Had it not been for
Sammar‘s job at the university in Scotland, her second journey to Aberdeen would not have
taken place.
The third type of movment is the temporal translation Sammar engages in between her
past and present, which emerges in the novel in the flashbacks that transfer her past into her
present, offering her a healing effect of some sort. Sammar starts to tackle the oppressive
feelings of grief over the death of her husband by grounding it more in religious concepts of fate
and God‘s will, which will also aid her when facing the oppressive relationship she has with her
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mother-in-law back home, who has accused her of being the reason behind the death of her son.
It is significant that in the process of engaging and negotiating the spatial, linguistic, and
temporal translations, Sammar falls in love with Rae and tries to translate her experience and
Islamic worldview for him, since she becomes interested in fulfilling the love relationship by
marriage. More often than not in the novel, translating language, place, time, worldview, and the
self seems impossible because of the incompatibility of the two places Sammar moves between,
the South and the North. However, once Sammar is able to connect her emotional and spiritual
fulfillment to the way she experiences place, a satisfying translation of self becomes possible
despite her physical geographic location.
Upon arriving to Aberdeen and taking on her first translation task, Sammar‘s anxiety
plunges her into a dream where she imagines that she is trapped at ―home,‖ afraid of braving the
deadly harsh weather to reach Rae, her boss, and give him her translation:
She dreamt that it rained and she could not go out to meet him as planned. She could not
walk through the hostile water, risk blurring the ink on the pages he had asked her to
translate. And the anxiety that she was keeping him waiting pervaded the dream, gave it
an urgency that was astringent to grief. She was afraid of rain, afraid of the fog and the
snow which came to this country, afraid of the wind even. At such time she would stay
indoors and wait, watching from her window people doing what she couldn‘t do:
Children walking to school through the swirling leaves, the elderly smashing ice on the
pavement with their walking sticks. They were superhuman, giants who would not let the
elements stand in their way. Last year when the city had been dark with fog, she hid
indoors for four days, eating her way through the last packet of pasta, drinking tea
without milk. (3)
This first encounter with the Scottish landscape, even if in a dream, marks feelings of alienation
and estrangement that are the highlight of the diasporic subject‘s experience upon encountering
foreign lands. The Scottish rain, fog, wind, and snow offer a setting of extremely hostile weather
that gives a sense of inactivity, immobility, helplessness, and indoors confinement, where
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Sammar cannot depart from her apartment, as the confrontation with the elements outside
arouses the sense of fear in her.
In addition, the heavy rain outside might ruin Sammar‘s translated document, which
would render going out to meet Rae pointless. The depiction Aboulela starts the novel with—of
the harsh weather of the North, Scotland, and how it immobilizes and isolates Sammar and poses
danger to her translated text—foregrounds the difficulty Sammar will continue to experience
while trying to smoothly translate herself into the North‘s landscape. Sammar, the translator by
vocation, will face multiple obstacles while translating herself, culture, worldview, and grief into
this seemingly impermeable landscape. This paragraph reveals Sammar‘s dislocation, where the
clear distinction between the weather Sammar was used to back home in Sudan and the weather
in Scotland render her immobile and confined indoors, making it difficult if not impossible to
interact with the Scottish landscape.
Upon waking up, Sammar notices that in contrast to the dream she has just had, it is not
raining, but rather there is a ―grey October sky, Scottish grey with mist from the North Sea. And
she does go out to meet Rae Isles as planned, clutching her blue folder with the translation of AlNidaa’s manifesto‖ (3). In reality the weather turned out not to be as severe as in her dream, and
thus Sammar‘s mobility is possible. Significantly, Sammar meets Rae at the ―Winter Gardens (an
extended greenhouse in Duthies Park)‖ (4). If anything, the Winter Gardens conjure up the image
of cold weather that Sammar has escaped from when waking up from her sleep; however, the
garden is a greenhouse that houses many tropical plants that have been uprooted, displaced from
their natural habitat, to be grown in special warm conditions prepared for their survival. Also,
what is interesting about these plants is their responsiveness; they survive in this new
environment and ―set down their roots in order to flourish; a deeply symbolic gesture towards the
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natural and generative need of all living things to find a terrain—whether literal or spiritual—in
which to root themselves, and so to grow‖ (Ball 120). This image of the greenhouse and the
tropical plants growing in it represent Sammar‘s self-imposed exile. Just like the plants, which
have been offered special nurturing and nourishing conditions for their mere survival in a
territory that would have otherwise killed them, Sammar has to search for a similar site of
survival, which, as the novel will demonstrate, is not a physical geographic site, but rather a
spiritual one.
Also, the description of the Winter Gardens is meant to conjure up the image of Sudan,
highlighting the contrast between Khartoum and Aberdeen: ―The cacti were like rows of aliens in
shades of green, of different heights, standing still, listening. They were surrounded by sand for
the room was meant to give the impression of a desert‖ (Aboulela 5). This image of the imitation
desert landscape juxtaposes the landscape of the South with that of the North, which becomes
―irrelevant above the glass ceiling,‖ marking the clear distinction between the here and the there
(4). This familiar environment reminds Sammar of elements of the past connected to home, and
to both fortunate and unfortunate events. When asked if her name has the same pronunciation as
the word summer, Sammar answers in the affirmative, explaining that her parents named her
Sammar upon her birth in Aberdeen. When returning to Khartoum at the age of seven, Sammar‘s
name was foreign to her acquaintances in Khartoum, where even when she grew older, she was
―the only Sammar at school and at college‖ (5). Rae then becomes curious to know the meaning
of her name: ―It means conversations with friends, late at night. It‘s what the desert nomads liked
to do, talk leisurely by the light of the moon, when it was no longer so hot and the day‘s work
was over‖ (5). Perhaps this name chosen by her parents while living in Aberdeen reflects their
nostalgia for home, the desert and all the social interactions with relatives and loved ones a
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person in diaspora misses out on. Most significantly, Sammar‘s name is forever connected to a
social and geographic site that she has left behind; she now experiences feelings of loneliness,
alienation, confinement, and dislocation away from the environment that would have offered her
―sammar‖ nights with friends and relatives. This disparity between what Sammar‘s name means
and the actual reality of her lonely existence in Aberdeen further emphasizes the contrast
between the North and the South. Also, since Sammar‘s life in Aberdeen does not relate to any
of the meanings and notions her name entails—social mingling, interaction and entertainment—
translating herself into this diasporic location seems difficult; she cannot fully communicate, and
she even mistranslates herself into her new location.
Furthermore, once Sammar starts feeling comfortable in the Winter Gardens that remind
her of home, the suppressed past and grief of her first journey as a married adult in Aberdeen
starts surfacing into her present through flashbacks. These flashbacks bring to her the images of
her mother-in-law, Mahasen, who used to treat her like a daughter before blaming her for the
death of her son, as well as of her sister-in-law, Hanan, her deceased husband, Tarig, and her
baby son, Amir, whom she cannot connect to as a nurturing mother. Also, they bring back
memories of how her religious identity has helped her survive the twofold grief of losing her
husband and of living in exile. Sammar starts narrating to Rae parts of that past while
―wondering which parts of the narrative to soften, to omit‖ (6).
Sammar‘s first flashback relates to her experience upon losing her husband and the way
the community of Muslim women who came to offer her support helped ground her sanity and
keep her from losing herself in pain:
They prayed, recited the Qur‘an, spent the night on the couch and on the floor. They did
not leave her alone, abandoned. She went between them dazed, thanking them, humbled
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by the awareness that they were stronger than her, more giving than her, though she
thought of herself as more educated, better dressed. She covered her hair with Italian silk,
her arms with tropical colours. She wanted to look as elegant as Benazir Bhutto, as
mesmerizing as the Afghan princess she had once seen on TV wearing hijab, the daughter
of an exiled leader of the mujahideen. Now the presence of these women kept her sane,
held her up. […]. Only Allah is eternal, only Allah is eternal. (9)
Sammar‘s religious identity is brought up through her expression of grief: she prays that she
might be spared further grief. It is through the community of women, her prayer, and her
spirituality that Sammar survives her heavy burden of grief. For Sammar, the sense of loss is
negotiated through spirituality, where even the act of covering her hair and body, metaphorically
disguising her pain, helps her cope with her loss and thus connects her to the women who prove
to even be better than she is, offering her support while she used to think of herself as ―more
educated‖ and ―better dressed‖ (9). It seems that Sammar dons the veil for the first time upon
experiencing the death of her husband out of humility and humbleness to God out of intense grief
over her loss. Also, when Sammar later experiences sadness and grief due to her alienation in
exile, the only thing that grounds her in reality physically is the five prayers, ―the last touch with
normality; without them she would have fallen, lost awareness of the shift of day into night‖
(16). The flashbacks that come to her in Rae‘s presence while she is sitting in the Winter
Gardens, which remind her of home, represent the religious consciousness with which Aboulela
endows her protagonist while connecting it to a sense of home and belonging.
Furthermore, the flashbacks bring Sammar memories from back home: she remembers
her initial good relationship with her mother-in-law and how that relationship shifted in nature
after the death of her husband. She tells Rae about the loving relationship she once had with her
mother-in-law but keeps from him the fact that her aunt frowns in the present whenever
Sammar‘s name is mentioned because she blames her for the death of her son. Also, Sammar
tells Rae about her son, whom she left with her mother-in-law, but she leaves out the fact that
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―[s]he was unable to mother the child‖ any longer after the death of her husband (7). In
flashbacks, she remembers that she looked at her child and told him, ―I wish it was you instead. I
hate you. I hate you‖ (7). The intense loss she experiences upon the death of Tarig, her motherin-law‘s hatred of her, and the vanished feelings of motherhood start coming back to her in the
flashbacks, and she thinks she must articulate them to Rae so that she becomes ―clear‖ of them;
the only way that happens is when ―she start[s] to speak‖ (7).
Yet Sammar is selective when she picks what part of the flashbacks to relate to Rae
because the intense grief she has experienced in the past defies translation. As much as she tries
to translate her own pain and grief into words, she fails, since she is not able to articulate the
most horrible of them, keeping the pain suppressed inside of her. Because of her inability to
translate pain into words, she starts feeling that the pain has taken a physical dimension, as
though it has marked her body:
Her invisible mark shifted, breathed its existence. […]. Four years ago, this mark had
crystalised. Grief had formed, taken shape, a diamond shape, its four angles stapled on to
her forehead, each shoulder, the top of her stomach. She knew it was translucent, she
knew that it had a mercurial liquid which flowed up and down slowly when she moved.
The diamond shape of grief made sense to her: her forehead—that was where it hurt
when she cried, that space behind her eyes; her shoulders—because they curled to carry
her heart. And the angle at the top of her stomach—that was where the pain was. (4)
Even though there remains something untranslatable and untransferable about Sammar‘s pain,
the inscription of it on her body makes it a tangible experience, despite her attempts to suppress
it. This mark and the pain that caused it must eventually be related verbally so that a cathartic
effect will take place. However, Sammar‘s failure to translate this pain into words can be linked
to the difficulty she faces trying to translate her new environment into a familiar geography so
that she can connect to it. Heather Hewett proposes that ―the spatial manifestation of loss as a
―diamond shape‖ suggest the four corners of a map, or of a compass, literally inscribed on the
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body. Like migration, loss possess a geography; and ‗stapled‘ viscerally conveys the ever-present
pain of loss‖ (267). The depiction of the pain as occupying a bodily geography just like the pain
she endures due to her recent geographic exile from her home causes Sammar to suffer a body
marked with the manifestation of this pain.
It is difficult for Aboulela to fully describe and represent the pain as a physical marker on
Sammar‘s body because pain in reality is intangible. When reading Sammar‘s marked pain,
Brenda Cooper, in her article, ―Everyday Objects and Translation,‖ reiterates the premise of
Elaina Scarry‘s theories on pain and the body: ―The novel works hard to describe the body in
pain, something which Elaina Scarry (1989) has warned us is notoriously difficult to represent‖
(45). However, Cooper tries to read this physical pain by linking the geography of the bodily
pain Sammar suffers because of the loss of her husband with the condition of exile she cannot
easily translate: ―We see the physical agony written onto her body is the result of her attempts to
negotiate between her worlds, […] Khartoum and Aberdeen‖ (45). Because it becomes
impossible for her to articulate to Rae the intensity of the pain she suffers, Sammar prefers not to
speak of it and leaves it as an ―invisible mark‖ imprinted on her forehead, her shoulders, and the
top of her stomach—where it is most burdening.
Despite the familiarity of the Aberdeen Winter Gardens, the setting remains an artificial
imitation of an atmosphere that reminds Sammar of home. In his book chapter, ―Leila Aboulela:
Islam and Globalization,‖ Geoffrey Nash points out that by employing the technique of defamiliarization when depicting the Western landscape and its relationship to the ―émigré‘s
deracination,‖ Aboulela juxtaposes ―the flavor of Africa against a Western setting,‖ which
reflects a ―usual exile‘s routine‖ (137). While I agree with Nash‘s general assessment regarding
the techniques the exile uses to become familiar with foreign landscape, it seems that the
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disparity between the two places for Sammar is minimized, even if temporarily, when the
Scottish landscape becomes a familiar one to her. ―Without the unnatural world of the hothouse,
Sammar‘s Aberdeen—perhaps predictably—is alien yet familiar‖ (Stotesbury 74). Bringing a
familiar landscape to an unfamiliar setting is a strategy Aboulela employs to relate how the
personal untranslatable experiences of her protagonist become familiarized to her when she starts
translating herself into the new place gradually, especially in the presence of Rae. Throughout
the narrative, Sammar will continues to experience this defamiliarized setting and landscape,
where home emerges into the Scottish setting every time she tries to relate her own physical,
cultural, emotional, and religious experiences to the new place. Also, it is when Sammar feels
emotionally connected to Rae that the merging of spatial and temporal settings takes place.
However, what remains a question for Sammar throughout the narrative is whether the romantic
and emotional feelings she holds towards Rae are enough to trigger sustainable feelings that she
belongs in this diasporic environment.
Significantly, it is not only the greenhouse that is defamiliarized so that it can have that
different yet familiar effect on Sammar‘s life while she is displaced in Aberdeen. Rae is also
represented in a defamiliarized manner; attributes considered typical of a Scotsman are absent,
but he holds ―familiar‖ attributes that Sammar can reach out and relate to. Rae is not typically
Scottish in features, traits, attributes, or even interests. He constantly makes Sammar feel
comfortable and reminds her of people from back home.
He knew the letters of the Arabic alphabet, he had lived in her part of the world. Rae
looked like he could easily pass for a Turk or a Persian. He was dark enough. He told her
once that in Morocco he could walk as if disguised; none suspected he was Scottish as
long as he did not speak and let his pronunciation give him away. With others, he looked
to her to be out of place, not only because of his looks but his manners. The same
manners which made her able to talk to him made the world vivid for the first time in
years. (6)
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We learn that Rae does not look like a total foreigner to Sammar. It turns out that he is familiar
with ―her part of the world,‖ he has familiar looks, and he is familiar with the language Sammar
speaks. This familiarity does not stop at that; Rae‘s manners are familiar to her: she feels
comfortable to speak to him, and she even falls in love with him as the narrative unfolds. In
addition, because Sammar is able to connect to Rae emotionally and express herself to him,
while he dedicates time to listening to her, ―[from] the beginning she had thought that he was not
one of them, not modern like them, not impatient like them. He talked to her as if she had not
lost anything, as if she were the same Sammar of the past‖ (30).
At a certain point in the novel, as Sammar starts having more of a personal relationship
with Rae beyond work, she starts describing him in familiar terms. Upon paying Rae a visit with
Yasmin, Rae‘s Pakistani Muslim secretary and whom Sammar‘s friend, Sammar feels closer to
Rae than she had before. During the visit, the subject matter the three discuss is Rae‘s interest in
and affinity for studying the Middle East and Islam: he admits that he became interested in
learning about Islam academically when he was a child through an uncle who moved to Egypt
and converted to Islam. Discussing Islam brings Sammar a huge step forward in terms of her
emotional connection to Rae; she starts seeing a potential relationship between them. Even if at
this point it remains too early for Sammar to assume that Rae would ever convert to Islam, she
asks Yasmin upon leaving Rae‘s house, ―Do you think he could one day convert?‖ (22). As she
becomes more familiar with Rae and starts to connect to him emotionally, Sammar feels as if
home has come to where she is:
Outside, Sammar stepped into a hallucination in which the world had swung around.
Home had come here. Its dimly lit streets, its sky and the feel of home had come here and
balanced just for her. She saw the sky cloudless with too many stars, imagined the night
warm, warmer than indoors. She smelled dust and heard the barking of stray dogs among
the street's rubble and potholes. A bicycle tinkled, frogs croaked, the muezzin coughed
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into the microphone and began the azan for the Isha prayer. But this was Scotland and
reality left her dulled, unsure of herself. (20- 21)
As Sammar feels closer to Rae emotionally, she starts envisioning the fusion of home and the
Scottish landscape, familiarizing the landscape with images, sounds, and smells that are
connected to her home. Not only does she experience the Scottish landscape in familiar terms,
but she also feels ―that Rae is different. […] He‘s sort of familiar, like people from back home‖
(21). Sammar‘s experience of the landscape is directly connected to her emotional state, and
when she starts connecting emotionally to Rae, she starts seeing a possible reconciliation
between her two worlds. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that this fusion of home and the
Scottish landscape come to her through an artificial greenhouse setting and in a ―hallucination in
which the world had swung around,‖ which indicates that Sammar remains confused regarding
her feelings towards the landscape she is situated in, and also by the state of her feelings for Rae,
a confusion that plunges her into hallucination and dullness. However, once Sammar reaches
home and is physically distant from Rae, she suffers a headache that will not go away until she
sleeps. Because Sammar‘s sense of location and familiarity is connected to her feelings for Rae,
it becomes important that the romantic relationship remain sustainable so that Sammar
experiences her location in a stabilized manner; otherwise, she will remain dislocated from the
surrounding and physical landscape she dwells in.
Because Sammar‘s perception of landscape and place become connected to her emotional
state with Rae, once he is absent she feels dislocated and disconnected from her surroundings.
When she does not see him or talk to him for a couple of weeks during the winter break and
while school is out, Sammar‘s perception of the landscape emphasizes the difference and
disconnection between the South and the North:
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She said that colours made her sad. Yellow as she knew it and green as she knew it were
not here, not bright and vivid as they should be. She had stacked the differences; the
weather, the culture, modernity, the language, the silence of the muezzin, then found that
the colours of mud, sky and leaves were different. (39)
Feelings of nostalgia for home start invading Sammar‘s emotional landscape: she no longer can
connect to Aberdeen nor see home, Khartoum, in it in any way. While Rae is physically absent,
Sammar starts experiencing Aberdeen in the sense of absence; the vivid colors, smells, and
sounds from back home that she was able to conjure up in this foreign setting are now absent just
as Rae is. At this moment, the disparity between the landscapes, cultures, language, and religions
are highlighted in Sammar‘s perception of her diasporic experience. However, once Sammar
reconnects with Rae and is in touch with her feelings for him, the fusion of home and the foreign
landscape takes place yet again. When Rae calls Sammar towards the end of the winter break,
her senses once more recall the smells, sounds and feelings connected to home:
She ran up the stairs that she has often taken a step at a time, dragging her grief. Now the
staircase has a different aura, a different light. […] Where was she now, which country?
What year? She climbed the stairs into a hallucination in which the world had swung
around. Home and the past had come here and balanced just for her. (41)
The feelings of comfort with Rae and her emotional connection to him causes Sammar to forget
where she is and thus gain a physical comfort in her location despite her dislocation from her
actual home. Connecting her experience of landscape and home to her emotional experience will
prove throughout the narrative not sufficient for Sammar to fully feel at home.
It is only when Sammar connects her emotions with her faith and religion that she is able
to reconcile her sense of fully belonging with a satisfying relationship with Rae. Upon Rae‘s
return to school after the winter break and upon her stronger emotional attachment towards him,
she starts wondering whether Rae could possibly convert to Islam. Sammar‘s religious
consciousness starts irking her when she imagines that Rae‘s secularism will stand in the way of
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her everlasting happiness. When Yasmin asks her if Rae intends to convert, Sammar becomes so
uncomfortable that she starts wondering if Rae even believes in God. At that moment she feels
like her world has been shattered and runs downstairs to the phone to call Rae and get a
comforting answer that will hold her world together. While waiting for Rae to answer, with
every phone ring Sammar feels ―the unanswered ring cutting through emptiness, a windy place‖
(94). Unlike usually, when she is comforted by the mere presence of Rae, which conjures up
images of home, now that she feels destabilized because of the different religious views they
both hold, she feels that some elements of the Scottish wind and cold are seeping into her body.
When Rae answers the phone, she immediately asks him, ―Rae, do you believe in God? […]
You‘re not a… an… atheist?‖ Rae answers, ―No, I‘m not‖ (95). However, Sammar continues to
feel uncomfortable: even if Rae believes in God, it is Islam that needs to become his faith if they
are to consummate their relationship and get married.
The reconciliation of places that is connected to Sammar‘s emotional state while she is
with Rae in Aberdeen does come to a halt when she becomes overly involved emotionally with
Rae but he refuses to convert to Islam, making their marriage impossible. Sammar feels that this
climactic moment of rejection destabilizes her emotions and connection to place; she then
decides to return home, accepting a translation task in Egypt that will delay her arrival for a
couple of weeks. Upon the emerging feelings of hurt and rejection she suffers, the sense of
displacement is heightened, and she starts retreating to a state of alienation and detachment from
her surroundings; the once-familiar setting becomes totally foreign to her. After leaving Rae‘s
office upon his refusal to convert to Islam, Sammar fully experiences the freezing cold of this
foreign environment as harsh as it could have ever been: ―Everything clear and cold. Her breath
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smoke, the snow speckles of diamonds to step on‖ (129). Once she boards the plane and is above
Aberdeen, all she sees is a ―[s]mall, compact city that belittled her hope‖ (132).
Even though at the moment of her departure Sammar is fully estranged from the
landscape of Aberdeen because her hopes for Rae‘s conversion have been vanquished, she panics
about the mixed feelings she has towards home: ―She thought of going home, seeing home again,
its colours again and in spite of yearning, all she had now was reluctance and some fear‖ (87).
However, once she is back to Khartoum, the first thing she does is participate in a group prayer
at the mosque, reconnecting with the spirituality and faith that is rooted and connected to home:
When she stood her shoulders brushed against the women at each side of her, straight
lines, then bending together but not precisely at the same time, not slick, not
synchronized, but rippled and the rustle of clothes until the foreheads rested on the mats.
Under the sky, the grass underneath it, it was a different feeling from praying indoors, a
different glow. She remembered having to hide in Aberdeen, being alone. She
remembered wanting him to pray like she prayed hoping, for it. The memory made her
say, Lord, keep sadness away from me. (159- 160)
This passage offers an insight into how Sammar experiences location and self-location as a
diasporic subject returning back home. On a superficial level, it seems that Sammar‘s sense of
belonging and home stem from inserting herself back into the landscape of her home, Sudan, and
connecting to its community, and its spirituality rooted in the Islamic faith. Also, this connection
to home and Islam highlights the loneliness Sammar felt praying alone in Aberdeen. Yet this
sense of belonging is not enough to offer Sammar a fully satisfactory, nourishing spiritual
experience. While praying, Sammar‘s displaced emotions connected to Aberdeen are evoked: it
seems that she imagines that had Rae accepted Islam and not left her to pray alone, he would
have been the substitute to this community of prayers, and that alone would have offered her
enough spiritual nourishment and grounding despite her location. In fact, the supplication she
utters after performing the prayer, ―Lord, keep sadness away from me,‖ reflects the agony and
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sadness she continues to experience: first, Rae does not share her same faith, and second, he is
absent from her home in the geographical sense. In reality, home for Sammar does not offer a
full sense of belonging, since she remains in a state of agony over the absence of an emotionally
satisfying experience. Even home and her faith together do not offer any remedy for Sammar in
this case.
Sammar‘s fear of home materializes as she sets foot in Khartoum, where she will have to
confront yet again the past grief that she worked her way through when she was in Aberdeen.
She finds that Mahasen has not yet gotten over blaming her for the death of her son; once she
accuses Sammar of being a liar, of quitting her job in Aberdeen so that she would not have to
contribute to Mahasen financially. When Sammar speaks back at her, Mahasen says, ―You‘re a
liar and you killed my son. […] You nagged him for that car and that car killed him‖ (171).
Numbed by the grief rekindled in Khartoum, and disappointed with the harsh reality of
home, Sammar starts experiencing the same dullness, crippling pain, dreams, and hallucinations
that prevent her from fully sensing the reality of her immediate landscape. Due to the sense of
emotional detachment she feels toward the people around her while she is at home, she starts
envisioning that Aberdeen has appeared in Sudan. This vision comes to her while she is feeling
uncomfortable by the hot summer, so she goes to fetch a cold glass of water from the fridge for
her demanding aunt:
The sudden chill when she opened the fridge door on a day that was too hot; the blue
cold, frost and it was Aberdeen where he was, his jacket and walking in grey against the
direction of the wind. White seagulls and a pale sea, until her aunt behind her shouted,
―What are you doing standing like an idiot with the door of the fridge wide open.
Everything will melt.‖ (182)
Since the image of a home that feels like home does not materialize in Sammar‘s life, her sense
of belonging to Khartoum is destabilized and falls apart. Her search for a landscape to translate
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herself, emotions, and identity into fails, even though she finds some sense of sensory familiarity
in the landscape and religious and spiritual fulfillment. However, the sense of dislocation
continues to invade her life while she is in Khartoum, where the cold and frost of the fridge bring
back familiar images from Aberdeen. Not only does the landscape of Aberdeen emerge into her
present, she envisions Rae walking against the wind, perhaps toward the South—Khartoum.
However, once such visions disappear and she realizes that she is at home, yet suffering a sense
of alienation and loneliness, she retreats to sleep: ―She wanted a bed and a cover, sleep. She
wanted to sleep like she used to sleep in Aberdeen, everything muffled up and grey, curling up,
covering her face with the blanket, her breath warming the cocoon she had made for herself‖
(171). The dislocation Sammar feels and the collapse of the here and there continue to fragment
her identity: Sammar chooses to shut herself away, detaching herself from her immediate
physical landscape.
Sammar‘s experience of the cold while in Khartoum—just as the reverse had happened to
her in Aberdeen, where she experienced the heat of the Winter Gardens in the midst of the cold
Scottish winter—signifies that the disparity between the two locations will not allow her a full
sense of belonging to either place. Her sense of belonging is experienced partially in Aberdeen
through her emotional relationship with Rae, yet it is never complete. Conversely, her religion
and spirituality are partially experienced in Khartoum, where the community keeps her in touch
with them, yet she remains sad due to the absence of familial and romantic love. Thus, her life
continues to be defined in terms of lack until she reaches a point where her sense of belonging is
fulfilled despite the location she exists in.
This becomes possible once Sammar realizes that both emotional and spiritual love are
not attached to any physical place or landscape, a fact she realizes towards the end of the
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narrative. It is when Rae converts to Islam out of sincere conviction and comes to Khartoum to
propose to her and take her back to Aberdeen that she grasps that confessing and belonging to a
religion are not exclusive to certain people or rooted in specific places. Upon first hearing about
his conversion through a friend, who sends her a letter with the news, Sammar writes to Rae
telling him, ―Please come and see me. Please. Here is where I am…‖ (191). While Rae has
offered Sammar a sense of home in Aberdeen previously, he did not fully offer her a sense of
belonging due to the different religious identities they held. However, once he converts to Islam,
Rae offers a full reconciliation of the physical, emotional, and the spiritual. Mainly, Rae‘s
conversion to Islam out of sincere conviction: he translates Islam into a faith he believes in, and
he offers Sammar a space and place that is not connected to a specific physical geography, since
Islam is not a religion ―tied to a particular place‖ (198). Thus, one can obtain a sense of
belonging and home while disconnected from any specific geographical location, which gives
this sense a universal space, anywhere and everywhere. Also, what Aboulela tries to establish at
the end of the narrative is that in this transnational, global world, ―location is not an essential
ingredient of Muslim practice any more‖ (Steiner 3).
Lost/Found in Translation: Translating Text, Worldview and the Self
It is because Sammar accepts a translation job at a Scottish University in Aberdeen
working for Rae Isles that her departure from home ensues. However, once she discovers that
she is failing at the very task she departed to Aberdeen for, translation, she decides upon another
departure back home to Khartoum. During both of her departures and the subsequent arrivals,
whether abroad or at home, Sammar engages linguistic, cultural, and religious translation, a task
that proves to be difficult, and at times impossible due to the disparity between the two
languages and worlds she operates in. Living between two worlds for Sammar will involve
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translating the South into the North, the Arabic language into English, and her Islamic faith into
a secular world. At times, Sammar is not aware that even though she takes the task of translating
the aforementioned components sincerely, there are elements that by nature remain
untranslatable.
Sammar‘s failure to translate is not entirely her fault, as Aboulela suggests in the novel.
Her condition as a diasporic subject operating and living between two different cultures,
languages, and worldviews involves translation, mistranslation, and impossible translations.
Once Sammar realizes that her task as a translator is actually to transfer and render meaning from
the source language and culture to the target one and not to reproduce it, which is an impossible
task, she becomes able to communicate successfully between her two worlds. Losing and finding
meaning in the process of translation is an element she negotiates while trying to grasp what is
difficult to translate, her religious identity. However, eventually, when she manages to translate
herself, culture, and faith to Rae and Rae does the same successfully, a departure back to
Aberdeen becomes possible while the two are reunited.
During a conversation Sammar and Rae have about the difficulties one faces when
translating the Qur‘an, the following exchange takes place:
He said, ―Translations don‘t do it justice. Much is lost…‖
―Yes, the meanings can be translated but not reproduced. And of course, the miracle of it
can‘t be reproduced… But even then, hearing it from the Prophet, peace be upon him, not
everyone believed. Not everyone accepted that the source and wording of what they were
hearing came from Allah.‖ (124)
This paragraph brings up three particular themes the novel addresses with regards to translation,
the first of which is meaning is lost in translation, generally, due to linguistic and cultural
differences. Second, translations of the Islamic religious text from Arabic, specifically, to any
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other language remain insufficient, since its meaning cannot be reproduced. Throughout the
novel, Sammar relentlessly tries to translate the Islamic faith to Rae yet finds certain aspects of it
sometimes untranslatable and impossible to communicate due to their different worldviews and
cultural disparity. Third, even when the Qur‘an and the Islamic faith are translated, it does not
necessarily mean that people will believe in it. Significantly, in this paragraph, Aboulela seems
to highlight the fact that Sammar will be faced with a triple hardship when engaging in linguistic,
cultural, and religious translation for Rae. At times, despite her effort, Sammar will be unable to
effectively translate between Arabic and English, the South and the North, and Islam and
secularism. However, she will try hard to push ―the Arabic into English, English into Arabic,‖ to
the extent of mistranslating of Rae‘s identity and his worldview to suit her own. Yet, when she
finds it impossible to fully communicate an effective translation of her world and the world
around her, she initiates a departure and leaves the whole task behind disappointed. Sammar
matures as a devout Muslim when she realizes that everything is in the hands of God and that
everything hinges on only God‘s will, whether it suits her or not. Just when Sammar learns how
to negotiate what she can acquire out of her own choice and how her choices are regulated
through God‘s will, she matures. Furthermore, once Rae finds what was lost in Sammar‘s
translation and communication with him, he initiates his own departure that starts with a deep
spiritual journey to find Islam first and then to find her and offer her marriage.
Sammar travels to Aberdeen after accepting a translation job for the Department of
Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the university in Aberdeen. At the time, the Gulf War is
taking place, and there is a high demand for religious and political texts to be translated from
Arabic to English:
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She had been lucky. There was a demand for translating Arabic into English, not much
competition. Her fate was etched out by a law that gave her a British passport, a point in
time when the demand for people to translate Arabic into English was bigger than the
supply. (73).
On the one hand, Sammar‘s travel to Aberdeen was made possible by the political climate and
the high demand for Arabic translators. On the other hand, obtaining the job was possible for her
due to her parents‘ journey to the UK early in their lives; Sammar was born there and thus has
gained a British passport. However, Sammar corrects the way she attributes her luck in obtaining
the job by remembering that her faith ―was etched out by Allah Almighty.‖ Sammar‘s constant
negotiation between actions that happens in the material life and God‘s will will continue to be a
site of negotiation until the end of the novel.
Sammar is usually careful and conscious when attempting to use language and speak or
translate, whether she is translating language or the culture, people, and life in Aberdeen. When
attempting to speak or translate, Sammar is usually concerned with people‘s reactions to her,
which makes her hyper conscious of what she produces or says: ―In this country when she spoke
to people, they seemed wary, on their guard, as if any minute she would say something out of
place, embarrassing‖ (6). Thus, upon speaking or translating, Sammar thinks of what ―to soften,
to omit‖ of the narrative (6). Just like when speaking or translating, Sammar continues to be alert
to the possibilities of mistranslations of language, culture, and people that could occur in her
displaced setting, Aberdeen.
Sammar translates for Rae, the secular humanist and a professor of Middle Eastern
history and the author of a book called, The Illusion of an Islamic Threat. ―When he appeared on
TV or was quoted in a newspaper, he was referred to as an Islamic expert, a label he disliked
because, he told Sammar, there could be no such monolith‖ (5). Once Sammar is introduced to
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him and learns about his academic interest, specializing in the Middle East, the Arabic language,
and Islam, her natural tendency is to start questioning why he has this interest in Islam and the
Middle East. However, as she starts developing emotional feelings for him, she becomes
interested in his actual conviction towards Islam. During her visit to his place, accompanying
Yasmin, his secretary, Rae tells them both about how his uncle, who had moved to Egypt when
Rae was in middle school, converted to Islam. Being fascinated by his uncle‘s unusual spiritual
route, Rae, who was always a rebel at school, writes an article for a class assignment entitled,
―Islam is Better than Christianity,‖ which gets him expelled from school (17). However, it turns
out that as he grew up, Rae‘s interest in Islam is only related to the academic realm, spurring on
his research about the Middle East, a fact that disappoints Sammar.
After leaving Rae‘s place, Sammar investigates Rae‘s ideological background and its
connection to his worldview by asking Yasmin about his ideological convection. Yasmin
answers,
―He‘s an orientalist. It‘s an occupational hazard.‖ Sammar didn‘t like the word
orientalist. Orientalists were bad people who distorted the image of Arabs and Islam. […]
―Do you think he could one day convert?‖ ―That would be professional suicide.‖ (21)
Interestingly, Yasmin uses the word orientalist to describe Rae, even though he studies the
Middle East, its culture, and its religion in an ―objective‖ manner. Rae is represented as a
modern orientalist who does not view the Arabs or Islam as a threat, unlike traditional
orientalists. Also, when Rae started pursuing an academic degree specializing in the Middle East,
he traveled to Egypt and Morocco, where he comes into contact with the local people, culture,
and politics, allowing a more grounded immersion into the areas of his specialization. As he
matures academically, he realizes that he should carefully and responsibly position himself in the
Western discourse about the Middle East, saying,
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―I wanted to understand the Middle East. No one writing in the fifties and sixties
predicted that Islam would play such a significant part in the politics of the area. Even
Fanon, who I have always admired, had no insight into the religious feelings of the North
African he wrote about He never made the link between Islam and anti-colonialism.‖
(109)
Rae stresses how unlike Fanon, who was considered a significant postcolonial theorist but
missed the link between Islam and anti-colonialism, his political interest in the Middle East and
most of his research was conducted to make that link between Islam and anti-colonialism. This
type of research makes it possible for Rae to actually dismiss imperialist and orientalist
discourses about the Middle East as biased and inaccurate.
Once Sammar realizes how familiar and sympathetic Rae is toward the Middle East, its
culture, and Islam, she starts contemplating the possibility of taking this relationship he has with
Islam a step further toward conversion. Yasmin emphasizes the impossibility of such happening,
stressing that it would be viewed in the West as if he joining ―the religion of terrorists and
fanatics. That‘s how it would be seen. He‘s got enough critics as it is: those who think he is too
liberal, those who would have accused him of being a traitor just by telling the truth about
another culture. […] A traitor to the West. You know, the idea that West is best‖ (22). Rae has
been constantly mistranslated by his own people and culture, sometimes accused of being a
traitor to his own culture and becoming a target of hate mail and abusive phone calls. However,
due to his political stance and his commitment to postcolonial politics, Rae is a man operating
between two worlds, and he could be mistranslated in either world. Sammar, on the other hand
mistranslates Rae‘s academic interest in Islam as a step toward his conversion.
Conversely, Sammar mistranslates Rae and his political stance and sympathy toward the
Middle East, constantly attributing his academic knowledge of and sympathy toward the Middle
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East and Islam to a personal interest in Islam. When Yasmin senses Sammar‘s interest in Rae‘s
personal conviction regarding Islam, she says,
―Are you hoping he would convert so you could marry him?‖
―Don‘t be silly, I was just wondering.‖ She breathed in and out as if it was an effort. Her
eyes ached, her nose ached. ―I was just wondering because he knows so much about
Islam…‖
―This annoys him.‖
―What annoys him?‖
―That Muslims expect him to convert just because he knows so much about Islam.‖ (22)
This scolding of Sammar by Yasmin for assuming that Rae‘s mere interest in Middle Eastern
politics could portend a conversion reflects a critique of the naive mistranslation of academic
interest into religious conviction. Rae‘s intellectual knowledge about Islam and the Middle East
will not be the core reason behind his final decision to convert toward the end of the novel.
However, Sammar‘s disappointment causes her to fall in ―silence‖ and retreat to sleep while
supplicating God, ―Ya Allah, ya Arham El-Rahimeen‖ (22). When she finally wakes up, she finds
that she has rid herself of what she thought must have been ―something between a migraine and a
fit‖ (22).
When Rae confesses that he holds emotional feelings towards Sammar, and Sammar
mistranslates them into his interest in converting to Islam, he makes it clear that his personal
relationship with Islam and the Middle East is detached from his professional interest:
―It‘s not in me to be religious,‖ he said. ―I studied Islam for the politics of the Middle
East. I did not study it for myself. I was not searching for something spiritual. Some
people do. I had a friend who went to India and became a Buddhist. But I was not like
that. I believed the best I could do, what I owed a place and people who had deep
meaning for me, was to be objective, detached. In the middle of all the prejudice and
hypocrisy, I wanted to be one of the few who were reasonable and right.‖ (126)
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Rae is devoted academically to Islam and the Middle East, and his approach to it is ―objective‖
and ―detached,‖ since this devotion stems from an intellectual interest. Rae‘s approach to Islam
up until this moment is intellectual: he deals with it as a distant object of study that he is
sincerely interested in, yet he is not interested in becoming part of it on a personal spiritual level.
Once Sammar realizes that conversion is not an option for Rae even when he holds
emotional feelings towards her, she retreats internally and falls silent, thinking about how
ignorant he might think she is. Not only that, she becomes unable to translate some of the words
Rae utters while replying to her request for him to convert. He expresses his feelings for her,
saying that he has never felt ―empathy‖ toward somebody before; Sammar grapples with the
difficulty of the meaning of the word and mistranslates it:
She did not understand the meaning of the word ‗empathy‘. At times, he did say words
she could not understand, words she would ask him to explain. Sixties‘ scene, Celtic,
chock-a-block. But now she did not ask him the meaning of ‗empathy‘. Today she could
not ask. It sounded like ‗sympathy‘, and, she thought, he feels sorry for me. To him I
must have always looked helpless and forlorn. (127)
The emotional crisis Sammar experiences because of her misinterpretion of Rae‘s conversation
with her results in a total crisis of communication and translation from the foreign language,
English, to her own mother tongue. Sammar mistranslates Rae‘s word empathy, which is
supposed to leave more of a positive impact on their relationship, and interprets it as sympathy,
which has a negative impact and results in her retreat. Once Sammar feels disappointment and
emotionally lacking, translation becomes impossible. Not only that, she becomes uncomfortable
communicating with Rae and thus never asks him about the meaning of words he utters, thus
allowing mistranslations to take place. She leaves their final conversation with meanings
misinterpreted and feelings lost in translation. This failure to express, ask, and translate makes
the rift between her two worlds larger, and she will return to Khartoum having failed to translate
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herself into Aberdeen, its landscape, culture, and worldview. The clash of Sammar‘s worldview
with Rae‘s is a difference that makes them struggle as they translate themselves to one another.
A couple of days prior to Sammar‘s departure and after the disappointing final
conversation she has with Rae, she tries to finalize the last translation task in Aberdeen before
leaving but suffers writer‘s block:
Windows in red and blue flew towards her. They got bigger and clearer as they came
close to the surface of the computer screen and then passed away. She had stopped
changing the Arabic into English, stopped typing; and the words had flickered and
disappeared into the blackness, from which the flying windows now came. (111)
At this point, Sammar stops translating because the words flicker and disappear into blackness
that reflects the emptiness she feels due to the failure of effecting a successful translation
between her worldview and Rae‘s. Losing her ability to translate is the climactic point in the
narrative: Sammar realizes that Rae‘s and her own world will not intersect due to the
incompatibility of her Islamic devotion with his ―objective‖ and ―detached‖ secular stance
toward it (128)
While Sammar is in Egypt on a two-week temporary job as a translator prior to arriving
in Khartoum, she spends all her days and nights working hard ―pushing Arabic into English,
English into Arabic, staying up late with hotel smells, typing out all the interviews‖ (156). The
act of pushing words from Arabic into English and vice versa reflects how troublesome and
difficult translating has become for her even after distancing herself from Rae, who was the
reason behind her inability to communicate and translate during her last few days in Aberdeen.
Even after arriving in Khartoum, and once Sammar loses complete touch with Rae and
Aberdeen, she totally loses her ability to translate and thus decides to seek a job away from the
field of translation. However, every now and then, when Sammar thinks about her ―exile‖ from
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Rae and her past in Aberdeen, she automatically becomes ―nostalgic for her old job, the work
itself, moulding Arabic into English, trying to be transparent‖ (164). For Sammar, translation is
connected to Rae: they both come to her in nostalgic memories, yet they belong to a distant past
that she gradually has no contact with. The use of the word exile in descriptions of her condition
when she is physically located in Khartoum, her home, highlights the fact that Sammar does not
feel total belonging, even back home: her emotional attachment remains in Aberdeen. Through
her word choice, Aboulela asserts that since Sammar does not fully experience emotional
satisfaction back home, she remains in a state of internal exile.
After several weeks at home, Sammar receives a letter from Fareed, Rae‘s friend,
informing her that Rae has gone through a deep spiritual journey and has converted to Islam out
of sincere conviction four months prior to Fareed‘s writing the letter. Despite Rae‘s connection
and familiarity with Islam since his childhood, he has not attempted during the years to translate
Islam into faith. However, once Rae decides to translate his knowledge of Islam finally into faith,
it becomes possible for Sammar and him to be together, since now they share the same
worldview and religious identity. Being excited about Rae‘s conversion—Sammar now believes
the barrier that once separated them no longer exists—she decides to write to Rae in his language
not her own. ―She had an airmail letter pad with her, a ball-point pen, two envelopes. She was
going to write two letters. They would say the same thing but not be a translation‖ (190).
The decision to write two separate letters without the need for translation marks
Sammar‘s final break with performing the role of a mediator between languages, cultures, and
worldviews. She finally consents to be acculturated to the North and its language without
compromising her religious identity, since Rae has also become acculturated with her own
through his final conversion.
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In the letter sent to Rae, Sammar asks him to come for her where she is: ―Here is where I
am‖ (191). This indicates Khartoum, her home. However, once Rae visits Khartoum and is
reunited with her, he proposes marriage and asks her to go back to Aberdeen with him. She finds
that her sense of belonging is complete with Rae, with whom she shares emotional attachment
and faith. Until then, Sammar ―had not been able to substitute her country for him, anything for
him‖ (198). Rae‘s conversion and their now-shared faith and religious identity seems to be an
adequate place for her to belong to. Finally, she defines her sense of belonging in religion, which
is ―not tied to a particular place‖ (198).
The novel attempts to trace the physical and spiritual journey Sammar goes through, at
the end of which she realizes that the place and space to ground her identity could be anywhere,
despite her physical location. Also, Rae, who experiences a spiritual journey, translates his
knowledge of the Middle East and Islam into faith and thus converts to Islam. Through his
journey, he learns that the spiritual path is a ―lonely‖ one (202). However, once he reunites with
Sammar and proposes to marry her, he makes of her and his newly acquired faith a place of
belonging. Likewise, Sammar‘s sense of belonging is not linked to any specific physical
geography, but rather is one that is based on her individual religious and emotional experiences.
During her journeys between Khartoum and Aberdeen, Sammar experiences physical
displacement and dislocation in both settings, until she experiences the fusion of the here and
there, and the now and then, in one location and temporal setting that is not defined by place but
rather by a religious/spiritual and emotional geography. Movement is the trope that binds
Sammar‘s identity and subjectivity together, highlighting her personal religious geography that
allows her to map her personal location despite the physical geography.
Minaret: Religious Displacement and the Replacement of the Self
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Aboulela‘s second novel, Minaret, published in 2005, continues to explore the experience
of the Muslimwoman, negotiating a religious Islamic gendered identity, social class, exile, and
Western secularism and values. Najwa, the narrator and protagonist in the novel, is in exile,
displaced in London after seeking political asylum after the 1985 Sudanese military coup that
overthrew the government and led to her father‘s execution over embezzlement issues. While in
London, Najwa negotiates the secular Western upbringing and identity she received and took on
while living in Khartoum with her newly acquired religious sensibility and growing Islamic
consciousness. While in Sudan, an Islamic country by faith, culture, and tradition, Najwa is
disconnected from her religious identity due to her family‘s social status and Westernized
lifestyle. Having experienced Islam as a tradition belonging to the servants at her household and
to the Sudanese students at the university who from lower social strata than hers and her friends‘,
she rediscovers Islam in London as a diasporic subject trying to ground her identity in a specific
place. After being exiled in London, which results in the destruction of her family—her mother
dies and her brother ends up a drug addict in jail—Najwa rediscovers the Islamic traditions of
her home country away from home and away from the people who are linked to home. After
being introduced to the community of women who come from various Islamic cultures,
ethnicities, and traditions at the Regents Park Mosque in London, which becomes the place for
her displaced flourishing independent Islamic subjectivity, Najwa finds her own place and space
that allows the formation of her identity rooted in Islam. Najwa‘s religious transformation
happens gradually within the London landscape: she finds a way to relocate her faith and sense
of belonging, proving that faith is not rooted in a fixed geographic landscape.
Both the physical and the spiritual journey Najwa experiences are narrated in a
disconnected temporal and spatial setting: Najwa‘s narration of her life constantly shifts between
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present and past, London and Khartoum, and an older secular self and a new religious self. This
discontinuity in time and place reflects and mirrors the discontinuity she experiences upon
rediscovering Islam away from home, Sudan, and away from her secular Sudanese relatives and
friends. It is only when she experiences displacement and detachment from home that her
religious identity is rediscovered: religion becomes the place of belonging that allows her to
reject Western values and thus construct an individualized Islamic identity that she can connect
to. Najwa‘s transformation happens gradually and independently: she finally chooses responsibly
to move from a Western secular subjectivity to one grounded in Islamic values detached from
home, reconstructing a self she connects to positively. In this novel Aboulela seeks to provide an
alternative to her protagonist‘s cross-cultural experience upon exile. Once displaced and then
relocated in London, Najwa seeks a new sense of self and identity, connecting to the community
of women at the Regents Park Mosque. This religious space becomes the place for Najwa‘s sense
of belonging and flourishing identity.
Minaret is a story of the individual journey the female protagonist and narrator, Najwa,
undertakes from Khartoum to London. The narrative is divided into three temporal settings: the
first deals with Najwa‘s early years growing up in Khartoum as the privileged daughter of an
upper-class Sudanese politician and businessman, living an extravagant and Western lifestyle.
The second part deals with Najwa‘s exile in London after the destruction of her family: she has
to endure a life of harsh financial circumstances that degrade her social status; she finally
becomes a housekeeper, working for privileged and rich Arab migrant families in London.
During this period Najwa has to navigate between her identity as a privileged woman and her
identity as a fallen woman who has lost her privileged social status. Also, after coming into
contact with the women at the Regents Park Mosque after her mother‘s death, she goes through a
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state of confusion and struggle between upholding a Western secular lifestyle linked to her past
in Khartoum and her newly acquired Islamic religious consciousness. It is not until she decides
to cut herself from her past experiences, including her relatives and friends from back home, that
a new identity starts to emerge. The third temporal setting of the novel takes place completely in
post-9/11 London, after Najwa has grounded her religious identity with her strong and deep
connection and devotion to the community of women at Regents Park Mosque. Najwa is aware
of her gendered religious identity in London and tries to relocate herself and sense of belonging
with those who share the same faith-based identities at the Mosque.
From Khartoum to London: Coming Down in the World and Najwa’s Displaced
Westernization
Beginning with the prologue of the novel, Najwa, the narrator and protagonist, starts by
expressing her present position in the world and then proceeds by narrating the story of her life
back in Khartoum and her early life as an exile with her mother and brother in London. After her
forced exile from her native Khartoum and the loss of her social and financial privilege, Najwa
articulates the claustrophobic sense of space and place she has come to occupy: ―I‘ve come down
in the world. I‘ve slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn‘t much room for me to
move‖ (1). With these words Najwa starts her prologue, describing the spatial and physical
position she has come to occupy in London in 2004. The movement she describes is downwards:
she has ―come down‖ and ―slid‖ in a world and space that is ―low,‖ with barely any room for
movement because of the limited amount of space she has come to occupy. We will learn later in
the narrative that this place where ―the ceiling is low‖ is the small apartment her mother has
purchased for them while in exile in London after becoming poor and prior to her death from
leukemia.
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The expression ―come down in the world‖ reflects how aware Najwa is of how far she
has come down socially and financially upon the destruction of her family. Now in her midthirties, Najwa was born in Khartoum to an upper-class Sudanese family: her father originally
came from a poor background but had married the daughter of a wealthy businessman who
helped him establish a business and go up on the financial, political, and social ladders. Najwa,
her twin brother Omar, and the family enjoyed a life of leisure: they had always spent their
vacations in London and had embraced a Western lifestyle when back home in Khartoum. Najwa
and her brother attended an American school in Khartoum, where they became excellent at
speaking English prior to going to the University of Khartoum for their undergraduate studies.
They had also lived their lives influenced by Westernization: they went to dance clubs and
listened to English songs, and Najwa wore miniskirts. Also, Najwa‘s father, by then a wealthy
Sudanese businessman and a close friend of the Sudanese president at the time, had enjoyed
drinking Western ―banned whiskey,‖ and her mother was always busy with charity work, in
addition to mingling with aristocratic families over barbeque dinners. After the 1985 military
coup that brought down the Sudanese government, Najwa, her mother, and Omar were forced
into exile, while their father was executed, having been accused of ―corruption.‖ After they enjoy
a life of stability due to a secure flow of money, their resources dwindle, and they are plunged
into a sharply lower financial and social status. Najwa‘s brother, who becomes a drug addict,
ends up in prison, and her mother becomes ill from blood cancer and dies, after what had been
left of money for the family has been spent on her medication.
Significantly, prior to introducing her past in Khartoum, her present life, her plunge
―down in the world,‖ Najwa continues to describe her present situation and the coping
mechanism and survival strategy she follows so that she can accept her fallen social status:
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Most of the time I'm used to it. Most of the time I‘m good. I accept my sentence and do
not brood or look back. But sometimes a shift makes me remember. Routine is ruffled
and a new start makes me suddenly conscious of what I've become, standing in a street
covered with autumn leaves. The trees in the park across the road are scrubbed silver and
brass. I look up and see the minaret of Regent‘s Park Mosque visible above the trees. I
have never seen it so early in the morning in this vulnerable light. London is at its most
beautiful in autumn. […] Now it is at its best, now it is poised like a mature woman
whose beauty is no longer fresh but still surprisingly potent. (1)
Najwa accepts the loss in financial and social status, as it is forced upon her, and she has no
power to change it, since her past is what has determined it. Yet, whenever Najwa experiences a
new beginning in her present life—as when she begins work as a maid at an Egyptian women‘s
household—she recalls the past that has lead to this life. In contrast to the downward movement
she has suffered in London, she turns her gaze upwards, where the minaret of the Regents Park
Mosque comes into view. The appearance of this minaret as she looks up marks a shift in
Najwa‘s mood from being bored by her routine yet resigned to it, to excitedly describing the
beauty of the London landscape in autumn. In this season, London is ―at its best,‖ just like a
mature potent woman. The parallel Najwa makes between London in the autumn and a mature
woman seems to mirror Najwa herself: a mature woman in her mid-thirties at the moment, who
has come down in the world yet still feels strong and potent because of her reconnection to her
Islamic faith, which gives her a strong sense of belonging and identity. The minaret that appears
before Najwa‘s upturned eyes will be the means for her survival: she will finally connect to the
community of women at the same mosque that hosts this minaret. Furthermore, even though she
accepts that she has come down in the world due to her being ill equipped to successfully change
her social and financial status, without the education and experience needed to land a wellpaying job, her renewed spirituality will become the place for her survival. While she has lost her
social, financial and national identity, her religious identity is what gives her a sense of self and
subjectivity. In addition, her sense of community and solidarity with the women at the Regents
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Park Mosque, who come from different ethnicities and social backgrounds, will provide her with
a collective sense of identity and belonging that will help her cope with the loss of her social
status and national identity.
Through the trope of memory, Najwa constantly shifts in time and place between the two
landscapes that have shaped her identity, from 1985 until her present life in 2004. She uses
memory and links it to her temporal and physical movement in the narrative as a strategy to
make sense of her family‘s destruction and what led her to change radically in terms of identity
and character. During this textual and narrative movement back and forth, we are introduced to
Najwa prior to her and after her exile: ―one life literally stops, replaced by a completely different
one‖ (Cariello 340). From the start, we are introduced to a Najwa who is totally different from
the Najwa we encounter in London upon the downfall of her family and the poverty she is
plunged into. The Najwa we are introduced to in Khartoum is solely defined by her social status,
which gave her the privilege of obtaining a Western education at the American School and a
Western lifestyle, a type of life the children of upper-class families enjoyed in the Khartoum of
the 1980s. Khartoum, the place where Najwa was born and raised, is where her family enjoyed a
life of lavish expenditure, leisure, and privilege; this lifestyle will become the primary reason for
their destruction.
Najwa‘s life in Khartoum is defined almost totally by her social class: her socioeconomic background is what shapes her life, the way she views people, and the way she
perceives the world around her. When introducing her father in the narrative, Najwa describes
him in terms of his social position and tells us about how she feels about it: ―He had married
above himself, to better himself. His life story was of how he moved from a humble background
to become manager of the president‘s office via marriage into an old wealthy family. I didn‘t like
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him to tell it, it confused me. I was too much like my mother‖ (Aboulela 8). Najwa, who from
the start enjoys the life of riches and privilege, was not sympathetic to her father‘s struggle to
take himself up the social ladder. Not only does she not feel comfortable hearing her father tell
his story, she is oblivious to his experience and does not want to hear about it. Being born into
the upper class is the only identification Najwa wants to acknowledge. When Najwa continues
the conversation with her father expressing how she could not identify with his life story, he
replies, ―Spoilt, […] the three of you are spoilt‖ (8). Najwa notices that her father is pensive
when he utters those words, as if he can foretell that his family will not be able to shoulder
responsibility in case they encounter hardships because they have always been born into
economic privilege and have not worked for it. It is important to note that when Najwa narrates
parts of her past, she selects them carefully, so as to have them foreshadow the later events that
will take place in her life. Significantly, the parts from her past that she brings up foreshadow the
destruction that her family will later experience and her coming down in the world.
Furthermore, Najwa‘s awareness of her social class and privilege is reflected in her
everyday life, especially when she takes the car to the university, unlike other girls in Khartoum
and reflects, ―Was I not an emancipated young woman driving her car to university? In
Khartoum only a minority of women drove cars and in university less than thirty per cent of
students were girls—that should make me feel good about myself‖ (10) Najwa‘s definition of
―emancipation‖ is linked directly to her economic status: this privilege is also linked directly to
her social freedom as a woman in Khartoum. Due to her class, Najwa‘s social and gendered
experiences set her apart from the underprivileged girls in Khartoum who cannot afford a car of
their own, nor do they have the social freedoms she has as a girl brought up in a Western
lifestyle. The consciousness she displays regarding her privileged class position in society is
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superficial and reflects a level of vanity in her character that will later on contribute to her
inability to successfully survive in exile. However, after reflecting on her privileged position, she
mentions that she would prefer to be driven by her brother Omar. Her lack of confidence that she
can be fully independent is a theme that will continue to appear during her life in Khartoum.
As Najwa is at the university near the library, she passes two girls from the class she is
about to attend who are smiling at each other. Sammar, who is totally conscious of the class
difference between them and herself, justifies herself for not having a friendship with them:
They were provincial girls and I was a girl from the capital and that was the reason we
were not friends. With them I felt, for the first time in my life, self-conscious of my
clothes; my too-short skirts and too-tight blouses. Many girls made me feel awkward. I
was conscious of their modest grace, of the tobes that covered their slimness—pure white
cotton covering their arms and hair. (14)
Najwa is conscious of the class distinction that separates her from other women in Khartoum,
especially those who come from villages and towns, as opposed to her urbanized, Western
upbringing. The highlight of the distinctions that stand out is the difference in dress code:
Najwa‘s Western dress style reflects her Western influence and upbringing due to her social
status, whereas the hijab and tobe the girls from the province don is linked to their traditional,
rural upbringing. While in Khartoum, Najwa links the Islamic dress codes to a lower social class
and the traditional part of the Sudanese culture, which she has been detached from due to her
family‘s upper social class. These social and religious distinctions are the reason Najwa does not
form friendships with the girls. Later in the narrative, when Najwa is in exile in London, she
reconnects to Islam and the Islamic dress code as she adopts a faith-based identity and connects
to the Muslim community of women in their various ethnic and social classes at the Regents Park
Mosque.
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Najwa‘s brother, Omar, is also immersed in the Western lifestyle: he drinks alcohol, does
drugs, goes to the American nightclub to dance to English popular songs, spends vacations with
the family in London, and has decided that when he is done with school, he will move to London
permanently. Najwa describes how Omar perceives the West: ―Omar, who associates the West
with modern and advanced civilizations ‗believed we had been better off under the British and it
was a shame that they left‘‖ (12). Even though Najwa is immersed in a Western lifestyle, she still
cringes that her brother embraces colonialism. However, Najwa remains attached to the
Westernization that is associated to her social class in Khartoum and never thinks that she would
want to move away from Sudan to live in London, whereas Omar wishes he could leave for
London to study there if only his grades at school were not so low they prevent him from going
away. When Najwa‘s father asks her if she is interested in leaving to study abroad in London,
she refuses, and Omar sarcastically accuses her of being ―over patriotic‖ (17).
At the University of Khartoum, Najwa becomes acquainted with Anwar and falls in love
with him despite the social, economic and ideological differences between them. Unlike Najwa
and her friends from her socio-economic class, Anwar despises ―Western music‖ and ―Western
ways‖ (25). Anwar, a leftist in his political views, is a student of political science and constantly
criticizes the government at university rallies and gatherings. He calls for the downfall of the
government because of its rampant corruption and advocates holding it accountable for the
growing disparity between the social classes caused by that corruption. At times, Anwar even
mentions Najwa‘s father‘s name as a businessman and political figure complicit with the
corruption of the government. Najwa, after falling in love with Anwar despite his opposition to
her father and the government, is warned by her mother to stay away from such a relationship.
During the last a couple of days she is still in Khartoum, oblivious to the calamity that will strike
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the Sudanese government and consequently her family, Najwa cuts off her relationship with
Anwar due to her mother‘s pressure. Later in the narrative Najwa will reconnect with Anwar in
London and attempt to reconstruct her romantic relationship with him and pay for his graduate
studies, only to discover that as Anwar was not sympathetic towards her family before they were
exiled to London, he will continue to contribute to her ―falling down in the world‖ status.
Significantly, Najwa does embrace the Western lifestyle while in Khartoum, yet she feels
an element lacking in her life, a void inside her. She constantly feels that her privileged socioeconomic class does not seem to fully complete her sense of happiness and security, and at a
certain point she contemplates her life:
A happy life. My father and mother loved me and were always generous. In the summer
we went for holidays in Alexandria, Geneva and London. There was nothing that I didn‘t
have, couldn‘t have. No dreams corroded in rust, no buried desires. And yet, sometimes, I
would remember pain like a wound that had healed, sadness like a forgotten dream. (15)
This unsettling sense of lack will be translated eventually into an awareness that her privileged
life and elitist social class are not enough to give her a full sense of self, subjectivity, and
identity. On the eve of the 1984 coup, Najwa‘s father is arrested, while she, her mother, and
Omar are secretly transferred out of the country and forced into exile in London, which will
become their permanent place of exile after her father is tried in court and executed for
embezzlement and corruption. The traumatic experience of being forced out of Khartoum and
losing her social and economic privilege in addition to her national identity will continue to
haunt Najwa until she connects to the community of women and the Regents Park mosque and
grounds a faith-based identity that she independently chooses to identify with and by.
During the first weeks of Najwa‘s and her family‘s political asylum, they maintain a life
of privilege, lavishly spending money and enjoying their lives like tourists in London, until
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eventually their bank accounts started to dwindle. Najwa, her mother, and her brother are
oblivious at the beginning to the atrocity that will befall their family. Najwa says that the ―first
weeks in London were OK. We didn‘t even notice that we were falling. Once we got over the
shock of suddenly having to fly out the day after Baba was arrested, Omar and I could not help
but enjoy London‖ (56). However, after Najwa‘s father is tried, his bank accounts and assets in
the country are frozen, leaving the family with less to live off of. Omar, who has become a drug
addict, forces his mother to give him massive amounts of money, until eventually he is
imprisoned for trying to stab a police officer, who arrests him for possessing drugs. Najwa‘s
mother is diagnosed with blood cancer, and her treatment costs them a massive fortune. Unable
to afford all the medical expenses, Najwa and her mother sell the Lancaster Gate flat they have
owned for years and buy a smaller one they can afford. However, her mother‘s health
deteriorates, and eventually she dies, leaving Najwa all alone, cut off from her previous life and
all the privilege associated with it. At this moment, Najwa feels downtrodden and that she has
come down in the world.
Not only is Najwa cut off from her family suddenly, she also is mistreated by her
relatives. Her uncle‘s wife, Eva, who instead of helping Najwa obtain a respectful job turns her
into her housemaid and even pays her less than what she would regularly earn for the same job
elsewhere. Najwa‘s cousin, Sameer, cuts relationships with her and her brother, since he turns
out to be more successful socially, economically, and academically. The way Najwa‘s relatives
treat her on the basis of their socio-economic privilege while in exile mirrors her previous
unsympathetic treatment of those who were from a lower social class than hers back in
Khartoum. In London, Najwa becomes the underprivileged among other Sudanese relatives and
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friends from her past, and thus their treatment of her differs on the basis of social and economic
status.
The last person Najwa reconnects with from her life back in Sudan is Anwar, and for a
short while their romantic relationship is revived. Anwar, who was in support of the first 1984
military coup in Sudan, was forced into exile after a political party opposed to the one he
supported staged a successful coup. Anwar‘s presence in Najwa‘s life provides the only
attachment she has to her past and home. Both Najwa and Anwar have been reduced to a state of
homelessness by being forced out of their homeland and thus have constantly felt a sense of loss:
unsettlement defines their recent state of existence:
―What‘s wrong with us Africans?‖ I asked Anwar and he knew. He knew facts and
history. But nothing he said gave me comfort or hope. The more he talked, the more
confused I felt, groping for something simple. Everything was complicated, everything
was connected to history and economics. In Queensway, in High Street Kensington, we
would watch the English, the Gulf Arabs, the Spanish, Japanese, Malaysians, Americans
and wonder how it would feel to have, like them, a stable country. A place where we
could make future plans and it wouldn‘t matter who the government was… A country
that was a familiar, reassuring background, a static landscape on which to paint dreams.
(165)
While Anwar knows facts that, at least, ground his knowledge in what exactly reduced him to
this state of exile, it seems that Najwa has no clue of why and how she has come to this state.
Her upbringing has not prepared her for this life of exile: she has not ever been independent, nor
does she have the qualifications that will help her survive in London. She feels unsettled,
rootless, and suffers the anxiety of not being able to build a future of her own, having been
deprived of home for good. The loss of country for Najwa is linked to her sense of having lost
her identity. When she tells Anwar that in London, while working for her aunt Eva, she has
earned a twenty-pound note during Christmas, he laughs, then remarks, ―So you‘re now
celebrating Christmas. You‘ve become a true citizen of London‖ (150). Nawaj replies back, ―I
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don‘t know what I‘m becoming‖ (151). Najwa is aware that her life in London is transforming
her identity somehow; however, she remains clueless as to who she is becoming in the absence
of a stable sense of belonging and home. However, she continues to express to Anwar her sense
of alienation and displacement in the London landscape.
Once her sense of belonging is shattered, Najwa‘s identity is shattered along with it. At a
certain point, Najwa compares the sense of displacement she suffers while in London with the
sense of belonging Londoners feel in their own city and country and envies them, saying, ―I
disliked London and envied the English, so unperturbed and grounded, never displaced, never
confused‖ (174). As opposed to her own unstable country, which has been experiencing political
unrest, England is stable and remains a stable home for the people who belong to it. Despite the
secular outlook and worldview she has been brought up with, she does not feel like she belongs
to London, since she still feels a sense of alienation, loss, and detachment from her surroundings.
It is not her worldview or lifestyle in London that will give her a sense of belonging.
However, Najwa‘s relationship with Anwar develops and becomes stronger, since he provides
her with a sense of belonging. At a certain point, Najwa starts visiting Anwar at his London
apartment, which he shares with two other Sudanese students. Anwar and his roommates are in
London temporarily, unlike Najwa, who has lost hope of returning ever to her homeland.
However, Najwa enjoys being at Anwar‘s apartment, which becomes a site for her to get in touch
with her Sudanese identity, since it is a place that provides her with a sense of cultural familiarity
and security. Like Najwa, one of Anwar‘s roommates is from an upper-class, Westernized home
in Khartoum. When Najwa meets him, she likes him right away, since he reminds her of friends
from back home, except that he is a communist like Anwar. Anwar‘s apartment becomes a place
of identity negotiation for Najwa, especially when Anwar and his roommates start talking about
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politics and religion. At a certain point, Najwa realizes that when Anwar and his roommates
discuss Sudanese politics, she is mostly interested. However, when they discuss Islam and
religion she is offended; not only because it is part of the traditions and culture that belong back
in Sudan but also because she has started feeling it as an element lacking in her identity. While
Najwa is playing cards with Anwar and his friends, Ameen, one of Anwar‘s Westernized
roommates, mentions that he has to leave because he has been invited over to a relative‘s home
for a Ramadan breakfast. Najwa is shocked. Even in a location and place in which she feels at
home, Najwa feels that if she not know that the month of Ramadan has started she has lost the
sense of time. When she expresses how important it is for her to know when Ramadan starts,
since it is an Islamic practice that she performs, Anwar and his roommates laugh sarcastically at
her because they have always thought of her as ―Westernized‖ and ―detached from Sudanese
traditions‖ (230). At that moment, Najwa feels as if she is ―all alone.‖ From that point on, Najwa
starts feeling a sense of loneliness and emptiness even in the company of Anwar and his
Sudanese roommates.
Eventually, Najwa, who has built up hopes that Anwar will marry her, is crushed when
she realizes that he never intended to propose to her, since he would not want his children to
have her father‘s blood. After paying for his graduate studies, Najwa feels cheated by him and
every other Sudanese person she has been in contact with while exiled in London. She is
shattered by the hostility she is treated with by the people she one day felt part of during her
upbringing in Khartoum. The social hypocrisy they have displayed after she has come down in
the world and lost her social and economic status is a part of her past identity that she no longer
identifies with. The final connection Najwa keeps with Khartoum and with her past is her
relationship with Anwar, but after he refuses to propose to her, Najwa feels further displaced and
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confused. It is during the Muslim month of Ramadan, which Najwa previously associated with
the culture and tradition of home, that Najwa becomes disturbed; she has not noticed that it has
started because Anwar, whom she was busy with, does not observe it. Najwa‘s sense of guilt
drives her to the Regents Park Mosque, where she will try to connect with a community that will
help her in become grounded in time and place and perhaps give her the sense of belonging and
identity that she has been longing to gain in diasporic London.
Najwa‘s search for the Regents Park Mosque, after she has been totally cut off from her
family, relatives, and friends and realized the impossibility of her return to Khartoum, indicates
that she will no longer attempt to connect or reconnect with the past, as she has failed to do so
previously. She realizes that reconstructing the past will not restore to her the same sense of
security, belonging, and social life she once had in Khartoum. Thus, her only option is to learn
how to separate both her past from her present, Khartoum from London, her old self from her
new self, in order to emerge with a stronger sense of selfhood and identity in the diasporic
landscape. From this point on, Najwa will negotiate the space provided to her in the Regents
Park Mosque with that of the larger and general London landscape in order to ground her identity
in a specific location, enjoy a sense of coherent selfhood, reconstruct a sense of home, and
eventually belong. The Regents Park Mosque will provide her with a solid location to belong to,
and thus Najwa will negotiate her identity in relation to the individual identities of the multiethnic Muslim women whom she meets at the mosque in order to construct an individualized,
personal identity and subjectivity with a Muslim identification base.
The Regents Park Mosque and the Reconstruction of Self
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Najwa finds the site, place, and space of belonging and rootedness that parallels her sense
of belonging at home: ―In the mosque I feel like I‘m in Khartoum again‖ (240). The mosque
becomes a secure space in which Najwa becomes comfortable enough to negotiate her sense of
self and identity. Finding the mosque and feeling a sense of belonging to it helps her cope with
the painful reality of uprootedness and the sense of loss of social and national belonging.
Commenting on Najwa‘s explicit ―re-Islamisation‖ by donning the hijab and connecting herself
to the mosque, replacing the sense of dislocation in London, with a sense of belonging, Olivier
Roy highlights her act as one related to the need to physically demonstrate her newly acquired
sense of belonging.
Re-Islamisation means that Muslim identity, self-evident so long as it belonged to an
inherited cultural legacy, has to express itself explicitly in a non-Muslim or Western
context. The construction of a ‗deculturalised‘ Islam is a means of experiencing a
religious identity that is not linked to a given culture and can therefore fit with every
culture, or, more precisely, could be defined beyond the very notion of culture. (Roy qtd.
in Nash 144)
It is the very fact that Najwa has rediscovered Islam as a faith in England and not in Khartoum
that marks her ―re-Islamisation,‖ a process that is not based on religious practices that are
connected to a specific culture. Also, even when this mere act of ―re-Islamisation‖ gives her a
sense of belonging and invokes a nostalgic sentiment that reminds her of home, it remains one
that she will acquire among the multi-ethnic women at the Regents Park Mosque .
Being at the mosque gives Najwa a sense of nostalgic belonging; as she is waiting for the
time of prayer, she daydreams about home:
I close my eyes. I can smell the smells of the mosque, tired incense, carpet and coats. I
doze and in my dream I am small back in Khartoum, ill and fretful, wanting clean, crisp
sheets, [and] a quiet room to rest in. (Aboulela 74-75)
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It is the religious space of the woman‘s corner in London that allows Najwa to transcend her
present and reconnect to the times when her life was quiet and peaceful. To conjure up images of
her family home in Khartoum is the closest Najwa can get to reconnecting to her past, because
for so long she could manage to deal with ―a fractured country but not a broken home‖ (165).
Najwa‘s connection to mosque becomes a way to collect her own self, which she feels was
fractured after both country and home were broken, and to rebuild a sense of a coherent
existence and belonging. Thus the mosque becomes the site that provides Najwa with the home,
family, and community she has lost.
Spending time at the mosque and mingling with women from different age groups,
ethnicities, social classes, and degrees of religiosity provides Najwa with a site for identity
negotiation and self-realization. As she observes the younger Muslim girls at the mosque, Najwa
realizes that their experience with Islam is and will be totally different from her own, since she
did not experience it until later in her life as a religion to practice and a faith, and also because
she is a first-generation immigrant in London:
Usually the young Muslim girls who have been born and brought up in Britain puzzle me,
though I admire them. I always find myself trying to understand them. They strike me as
being very British, very much at home in London. Some of them wear hijab, some don‘t.
They have individuality and an outspokenness I didn‘t have when I was their age, but
they lack the preciousness and glamour we girls in Khartoum had. (77)
Najwa‘s experience with London as a landscape of belonging and Islam as a religion to be
practiced differs from the experience of those second-generation Muslim women who have been
both born and raised as both English, despite their family‘s ethnic background, and Muslim.
While observing these diverse groups of younger Muslim women at the mosque, Najwa realizes
that Muslim women are diverse; for example, some wear the Islamic head covering, while others
do not, proving their personal and individualized ways of approaching faith and practicing it.
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Now that Najwa reconnects to Islam in London, she will have to negotiate this space of religion
and the general diasporic space she is located in.
Moreover, at the women‘s corner at the mosque, Najwa faces incidents in which she will
have to negotiate her place and stance from religion and ground herself in the religious
knowledge she already has or is learning when attending debates and discussions. Not only that,
Najwa finds herself having to negotiate her knowledge and identity against the other women who
like discussing religion and giving their own opinions:
But I become fragmented and deflated in discussions; I never know which point of view I
support. I find myself agreeing with whoever is speaking or the one I like best. And I
become anxious that someone‘s feelings will get hurt, or worse take serious offence, as
sometimes happens, and stop coming to the mosque. (79)
This sense of fragmentation Najwa feels at the mosque and between the Muslim women who
display a strong sense of grounded Islamic identity and belonging is similar to the feeling she
gets when observing those people from London who completely belong to the city, as they are
―grounded, never displaced, never confused‖ (174). As Najwa attends further lessons and enters
into a variety of discussion with the women at the mosque, she starts realizing her identity and
identifying her voice among them While out in London, Najwa is harassed by a group of men at
the bus station who are annoyed at the sight of her hijab, identifying her as a Muslim woman,
and her sense of dislocation and exclusion from the wider London landscape grows. But she will
feel a sense of inclusion at the mosque as she negotiates her personal position and place among
the community of women. Najwa finds that the women at the mosque provide her with a sense of
security and direction as she starts constructing her personal relationship with Islam and the
knowledge she piece by piece starts acquiring.
My guides chose me; I did not choose them. Sometimes I would stop and think what was
I doing in this woman‘s car, what was I doing in her house, who gave me this book to
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read. The words were clear, as if I had known all this before and somehow, along the
way, forgotten it. Refresh my memory. Teach me something old. Shock me. Comfort me.
Tell me what will happen in the future, what happened in the past. Explain to me. Explain
to me why I am here, what am I doing. Explain to me why I came down in the world.
Was it natural, was it curable? (240)
The women at the mosque provide her with a sense of solidarity and with a community to
negotiate her religious experience with and against. Even though Najwa‘s religious awakening
happens suddenly, her religious identity is acquired gradually, as she goes through the process of
negotiation and identification with Islam.
Furthermore, the mosque is not a place where only faith is strongly grounded; it is
constructed by Aboulela as a site for the negotiation of social, class and ethnic identity. Where
Najwa once socialized and identified herself with friends and relatives who were members of the
upper-class, Westernized elite in Khartoum, social hierarchy, class, and ethnicity are not the
bases for the social relationships that develop between Najwa and the rest of the women at the
mosque. The former identifications are insignificant when Najwa interacts with the other women.
Both Wafaa, who is from Arab origins and married to an English convert, and Shahinaz, a
Muslim from South Asia, provide Najwa with support and enforce her sense of inclusion among
the women from various backgrounds. The variety of experiences these Muslim women have had
gives Najwa a sense of individuality and personal religious identity, as she identifies with the
larger Muslim community of women. In his book chapter, ―Leila Aboulela: Islam and
Globalization,‖ Geoffrey Nash describes Najwa‘s religious identity negotiation as the following:
[It is] indicative of a modern globalized environment in that she makes an individual
choice in becoming a born-again Muslim. In the process not only does she reject the
secular values of a westernized world that stretches from London to Khartoum, she
adopts a position that is conscious riposte to these. […] But she uses this experience in
London to embrace a religiosity that emphasizes personal behavior over culture and
politics. (Nash 146)
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Najwa‘s growing religious identity after connecting to the community of women at the Regents
Park Mosque reminds her of how she was intrigued by the practicing Muslim students at
Khartoum University:
I reached out for something new. I reached out for spiritual pleasure and realized this was
what I had envied in the students who lined up to pray on the grass of Khartoum
University. This was what I had envied in our gardener reciting the Qur‘an, our servants
who woke up at dawn. Now when I hear the Qur‘an recited, there wasn‘t bleakness in me
or numbness, instead I listened and I was alert. (Aboulela 243)
It is not Najwa‘s religious nostalgia for the body of practicing Muslim students back in
Khartoum or the servants at her home that lead her to construct her own religious identity, but
rather the community of practicing Muslims has always created in her a sense of internalized
anguish. Najwa‘s connection to Islam as her faith and a basis for her identity comes from her
desire to connect to it on a personal basis.
The last site of identity negotiation and identification for Najwa is when she starts
working for Lamya, an Egyptian PhD student, who is in London with her brother Tamer, an
undergraduate student. While working at Lamya‘s place, Najwa forges a strong relationship with
Tamer due to the shared religious sense of identity the two uphold. However, Najwa‘s
relationship with Lamya is more antagonistic than friendly: Lamya lives a Western lifestyle and
mixes with Arab girls from her same class, while dismissing Najwa on the basis of her inferior
class and social identification. Interestingly, Aboulela constructs the character of Lamya to
parallel Najwa‘s old self in order to represent how far Najwa has come in the process of religious
and identity negotiation. However, Najwa identifies with Tamer, who is almost the only member
in his family who practices Islam as a religion and faith. While Najwa is talking to Tamer about
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his life and upbringing, they get into a conversation about their identities and how they identify
themselves:
―My education is Western. My English is stronger than my Arabic. So I guess, no, I don‘t
feel very Sudanese, though I would like to be. I guess being a Muslim is my identity.
What about you?‖ I talk slowly. ―I feel that I am Sudanese but things changed for me
when I left Khartoum. Then even while living here in London, I‘ve changed. And now
like you, I just think of myself as a Muslim.‖ (110)
Just like Najwa, Tamer bases his identity on his faith. He finds that Islam provides his with a
sense of location and belonging against the backdrop of his exposure to a Western lifestyle and
education. When Najwa asks Tamer about Lamya and how she views her identity, he answers, ―I
guess she thinks of herself as Arab‖ (110). It becomes clear that while Aboulela connects Najwa
to the women at the mosque, who offer her a sense of solidarity and belonging, her identification
with them is based more on religion than on gender. Further, to have Najwa and Tamer
experience similar identity identification while Layma‘s identity takes a different route reflects
the fact that Aboulela did not intend Najwa‘s journey to be one based on gender and a sole sense
of Islamic feminism. Rather, Najwa‘s journey is not ideology ridden or one dimensional; it is
toward achieving a nuanced, personalized, and individualized sense of faith that grounds her in a
location she calls home. Najwa‘s identity is multi-layered: she goes through social, class,
political, and religious negotiation in order to form an identity of her own construction.
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Conclusion: The Poetics of Journey
This dissertation explores the ways in which Arab woman writers reclaim their narratives
and the narratives of their female protagonists by employing the trope of journey, which involves
various types of movement, mobility, and travel, as a means to explore their complex
heterogeneous subjectivities. In particular, journey serves as a trope of female agency: it allows
these women to contest any notion of a fixed, unilateral subjectivity, and it allows them to map
personal geographies that are uniquely personal and individually hybrid. In this, these women
construct in-between imaginative and physical spaces that allow their multiple subjectivities to
flourish and new concepts of belonging and of home to emerge. These constructed in-between
spaces and the heterogeneous subjectivities of Arab women they incubate become sites that
register moments of empowerment. In other words, the trope of movement and travel provides a
strategy for inscribing the gendered negotiations of the multiple identities that may emerge from
such movement and narrate the complexities faced by these women during identity formation.
Movement across borders, identities, and narratives are among the tropes this dissertation has
highlighted and investigated. It is imperative that people understand the multiple ways
movement and travel is fleshed out in these selected literary texts and how each, in its own way,
destabilizes any attempt to represent the identities of Arab women and the spaces of belonging
they construct and inhabit as stable, coherent entities; rather, emphasizes the heterogeneous
subjectivities of these women.
In the primary texts analyzed in this study, Samman‘s Beirut 75 and The Body is a
Traveling Suitcase, Soueif‘s In the Eye of the Sun, and Aboulela‘s The Translator and Minaret,
the trope of journey in its various types allows self representation, the translation of place,
cultural translation, and identity negotiation. It is precisely the articulation of movement in its
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various forms and the space it produces in these narratives that allow the negotiation of identity,
selfhood, and individuality. All the narratives in this study tell stories of dislocation, both
physical and spatial, ones that involve various kinds of motion that empower female protagonists
to search and locate their identity in a place of their own choice. The mere movement implied in
the journey trope becomes a site for challenging, transforming, deconstructing, constructing, and
reconstructing individual discourses about Arab women identities and their experiences.
Chapter one analyzes the representation of the tropes of flight and departure from the
socio-economic limitations governing Arab women‘s lives and mobility during the mid 1970s in
Ghada Samman‘s novel, Beirut 75, and in her travalogue, The Body is a Traveling Suitcase. The
mere movement and travel that occurs in the narrative/travelogue is an initial step to opening the
doors for Yasmeena and Samman to assert their individual agency. Yet it is important to note
that the aimless wandering of the protagonist/persona in the two works represents moments of
feminist consciousness and recognition of the limitations of the socio-economic gendered status
quo that keeps such women aimlessly wandering without arriving at a better alternative that is
accepted by their respective societies and governments.
Chapter two makes a connection between the trope of journey as the process of moving
from one place to another, and Asya‘s act of reclaiming her narrative by speaking for herself, her
desires, and her personal choices. Also, this chapter explores how the upper social class Asya is
born into in Cairo, the theoretic space of the Mezzaterra, is characterized by a fluid cultural
hybrid exchange and mix with European (particularly English) cultures that initially marks her
hybridity. I argue that being born into such a hybrid social class in Egypt makes Asya susceptible
to her later cross-cultural experiences, where she does not valorize one culture she lives in over
the other, nor does she evaluate them against each other.
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Asya‘s Anglo-Arab encounter, as Edward Said terms it, is one that defines her identity; it
is only when Asya manages to reclaim her individual agency by constructing a personal, hybrid
life that accepts the paradoxes of her Egyptian and English experience that she is able to define
herself. Asya does not attempt to resolve the paradoxes and conflicts she obtains from
experiencing Egypt and England, but rather she tries to negotiate a common imaginary space to
translate herself into. It is the trope of journey and social mobility that allows Asya‘s personal
hybrid identity to constantly engage in the act of translating itself in the different places she
occupies, as well as translating the places she comes into contact with.
Chapter three underscores how Leila Aboulela employs the trope of translation as transfer
and movement between the original homeland (Sudan) and the host lands (Scotland and
England) her protagonists experience in an attempt to engage and negotiate the Muslimwoman
experience in the West. Aboulela defines an agency that negotiates the concept of the
Muslimwoman in her selected narratives through portraying the gendered, complex individual
journeys her female protagonists experience and how they ground it in their renewed faith
experience. Aboulela‘s female protagonists challenge any essentialist and reductionist labeling of
their characters, even when finally assuming a gendered, Islamic faith–based identity. During
their cross-cultural experiences, both protagonists, Sammar and Najwa, represent and refute the
concept of the Muslimwoman in the sense that they negotiate it against their cross-cultural,
diverse, yet individual nuanced experiences.
These authors present singular, personal, and individual experiences undertaken in
gendered geographic, emotional, and metaphorical journeys toward self-discovery and
actualization. It is this journey experience in the singular that allows the space for their
heterogeneous subjectivities to emerge. Thematically, these texts‘ exploration of journey and its
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relationship to self-representation, cultural translation, and the politics of identity negotiation
highlight the importance of the representation of the individual lives of diasporic subjects.
Accordingly, the three authors construct the lives of their protagonists/persona in the selected
works in an intensely individual manner: their protagonists are not representative figures of
anybody but themselves (except for Yasmeena when Samman links her sexual deprivation to the
deprivation of other Arab women across the centuries, constructing her as a representative figure
in that particular manner). In this sense, the authors are very careful when representing the
experiences of their female protagonists; they remain opposed to the homogenization of the
experience of Arab women The texts present individuals and their personal struggles such as to
make space for their desires, a strategy that enables them to avoid being squeezed into a singular
identity, place, space, discourse, and worldview.
This dissertation aims at participating in the ongoing literary scholarship on Arab
literature produced by women. By analyzing literary works by and about Arab women through
the journey trope, this dissertation underscores the specificities of the singular experiences of
individuals represented in literary works without trying to connect these narratives to a general
collective discourse. What is unique about these selected literary texts is not that the struggles
highlighted are predominantly between orientalist and neo-orientalist post-9/11 Western
discourses, which constantly reduce women‘s experiences to a singular narrative of passive
victimization, nor are they against traditional patriarchal discourses in Arab societies, which
historically have reduced women to the private sphere. Rather, the struggles presented in the
texts are mainly connected to how to assert an individuality and personal specific subjectivity in
a reality that mostly defines Arab women according to the aforementioned competing discourses.
Essentially, these authors in their literary representations create unique narratives that
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acknowledge individuality and personal experiences while navigating between imposed
discourses.
It remains important to note that during the analysis of the selected literary works, I have
not attempted to define them all according to a monolithic theoretical framework and discourse,
including Arab feminism and its different strands (secular and Islamic), due to the diversity of
visions they present. In doing so, this dissertation stresses the importance of viewing each work
on its own and how it engages the particular socio-historic and politics of its writers‘ milieu,
while being open to different theoretical approaches. I have made use of an eclectic assortment
of travel theories when analyzing Samman‘s The Body is a Traveling Suitcase to show the
psychological implication of journey and how movement affects the traveling subject‘s
perception of both home and foreign lands and how that experience affects the perception of
one‘s own identity. Also, postcolonial theory and its various manifestations specifically informed
my reading of Soueif‘s In the Eye of the Sun. Bhabha‘s theorization on hybridity and the ―third
space‖ of identity articulation highlights Asya‘s Anglo-Arab encounter as a site of hybridization.
In addition, I have applied some aspects of Arab secular feminism in my approach to Asya‘s
personal gendered development both in Egypt and in England; in both places her secularism is
grounded in the spirit of the Nasserite era, his pan-Arabist paradigm, and the social class her
family belongs to.
Furthermore, theories on Muslim feminism that engage Islamic discourse have been
informative in my approach to Aboulela‘s works, The Translator and Minaret. Specifically,
since Aboulela‘s works underscore the Muslim Anglo-Arab encounter, cooke‘s theories of the
Muslimwoman informed my analysis of how Aboulela clashes, engages, and negotiates this
hyphenated gender- and faith-based identity in diasporic settings.
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At this point in my research on this subject, I contend that the significance of reading
Arab women‘s literary narratives through the trope of journey in its various types of movement
offers a fresh approach to understanding the diversity, heterogeneity, and pluralism of presenting
Arab women‘s experiences. Also, the trope of journey acknowledges the geographic diversity of
these women‘s locations and the way it enriches their multiple subjectivities and marks them
differently. Most importantly, the trope of journey addresses singular journeys without
attempting to link them to any collective experience, allowing these Arab women to map their
personal geographies and to some degree carve personal identities defined not by hegemonic
discourses but rather by their individual struggles toward achieving agency and reclaiming their
own narratives. It remains important to note that the trope of journey facilitates cross-cultural
encounters: it offers a common ground for a constructive dialogue and debate between different
cultures, locations, and identities.
The trope of journey conceptualizes the experience of Arab women in literary representation by
recognizing an open-ended possibility of experiences, agencies, and narratives. In my future
research on this topic, I would be particularly interested in a comparative study that brings
together contemporary narratives produced by Arab women upon their Anglo-Arab encounter,
specifically the Arab-American encounter in the post-9/11 era. I would like to compare the way
Arab women writers represent female subjectivies and agencies upon interacting with a
landscape saturated with both fear and hope for the possibilities of communication and positive
interaction. It is quite important to investigate the representation of this particular gendered
Arab-American encounter, which will illuminate the important role Arab women literary writers
play in reshaping discourses, both home and abroad, about their own experiences and
subjectivities.
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Notes
i
According to Nabulsi, Ghada Samman‘s departure to Beirut was an initial step to set her foot on
a life of travelling. Nabulsi is the first to call Samman a Sinbad due to her adaptation of travel as
a lifestyle. (9-11)
ii
Rihla means a journey, voyage, travel; also a travelogue. Rihlat is the plural of rihla. See
Encyclopaedia of Islam online, second edition.
iii
Muallaqat are collection of seven pre-Islamic Arabic qaṣīdahs (odes), each considered to be its
author‘s best piece. Since the authors themselves are among the dozen or so most
famous poets of the 6th century, the selection enjoys a unique position inArabic literature,
representing the finest of early Arabic poetry. "Al-Mu'allaqat". Encyclopædia Britannica.
Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 15 Jun. 2012
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/395740/Al-Muallaqat>.
iv
The conventional pre-Islamic qasida has three integral parts: the nasib, the rahil, and the fakhr.
For the definition of each part of the qasida and its significance, check Suzanne Pinckney
Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak , pp. 6-8.
v
Antara was among a group of pre-Islamic poets, including Salik bin Amir al-Sa‘adi and Khaffaf
bin Umar al-Sharidi, who were of mixed Arab and African blood; they were called al-Agharibah
al-Arab, the Arab Ravens. These poets were outcasts from their own societies due to the social
status of their mothers. They have expressed their bitterness toward being cast out by their own
people in their poetry. Check Jawad Ali‘s book The Detailed History of the Arabs Before Islam,
1972.
vi
The hajj is one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith. It refers to the annual pilgrimage of
Muslims to the Ka‘ba in Mecca, in the Arabian Peninsula, modern-day Saudi Arabia.
vii
Talab al-Ilm, meaning the search for knowledge. Travel in search of knowledge is stressed in
Islam.
viii
For a comprehensive study of the Moroccan and Andalusian travel narratives in Arabic
literature and history, see Awatif Nawwab‘s book written in Arabic, :‫الرحالت المغربية و األندلسية‬
.‫مصدر من مصادر تاريخ الحجاز في القرنين السابع و الثامن الهجريين‬
ix
To further explore Taha Husayn‘s life, check his autobiography, written in three parts, entitled
The Days.
x
Mike Velez makes a parallel between the use of North or West and South or East when
critically analyzing Salih‘s Season of Migration to the North. He proposes that Saleh‘s use of the
dichotomy North–South is interchangeable with the usual use of East–West; the North or West
196
represents Europe and its colonial legacy, connoting power, civilization, knowledge,
enlightenment, and South or East represents the areas that were subjected to colonial rule,
connoting weakness, savagery, ignorance, and darkness. Check Velez‘ article, ―On the
Borderline between the Shore: Space and Place in Season of Migration to the North.‖ West
Chester University Audience, 2012.
xi
Gina Eleni reads Season of Migration to the North as a national allegory. Check her article,
―Season of Migration to the North as a National Allegory.‖
xii
Huda Sha‘rawi‘s memoir in Arabic is entitled, Mudhakkirati (1981). The memoir has been
translated to English by Margot Badran as Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist
(1986). The translation and publication of the memoir in English has been criticized for being
affected by the politics of reception of works by Arab women in the First World, thus containing
distortions of the original text that educators and students must be aware of when reading the
translated text. For a critical analysis of the politics of reception of Harem Years, check
Professor Mohja Kahf‘s article, ―Packaging ‗Huda‘: Sha‘rawi‘s Memoirs in the United States
Reception Environment.‖
xiii
Toukan‘s A Mountainous Journey was translated into English in 1990 by Olive Kenny. This
translation has been criticized by literary critic Nawar al-Hassan Golley for containing distorted,
mistranslated, and flawed translations that affect the meaning intended by the author. Check
Golley‘s chapter, ―Fadwa Tuqan‘s Mountainous Journey, Difficult Journey,‖ in Reading Arab
Women’s Autobiography: Shahrazad Tells Her Story (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
xiv
I explain in chapter one of this dissertation why Samman‘s departure to Europe without
obtaining governmental permission was problematic.
xv
George El-Hage reads Beirut 75 as an autobiographical work. See his article, ―Beirut 75: An
Autobiographical Interpretation.‖
xvi
Samman describes it as a sexual revolution (‫ ) الثىرة الجنسيه‬and sometimes as a sexual rebellion
(‫) االنتفاضة الجنسيه‬. It is important to note that Samman has personally called for a sexual
revolution, where she has proposed several conditions that will lead to the success of it. Check
Nabulsi‘s interview with her published in his book, A Study of Ghada Samman’s Literary Works,
page 79-80. Among women writers who wrote on sex and sexuality during the same time period
Samman articulated her ideas on the sexual revolution are: Layal Ba‘albaki, Hanan AlShaykh
and Collette Khuri. However, the only one who explicitly called for a sexual revolution was
Samman.
xvii
My translation.
xviii
In an interview Joseph Massad conducted with Ahdaf Soueif, Soueif discusses the
autobiographical influence in her novels. Read more in Soueif‘s interview given to Massad: ―The
Politics of Desire in the Writings of Ahdaf Soueif.‖
197
xix
―Middle Ground‖ is the literal meaning of Mezzeterra in Italian.
xx
Asaad Al-Saleh wrote a dissertation chapter analyzing Barghouti‘s memoir as displaced
autobiographical writing. Check: Displaced Autobiography.
xxi
The word ―hegra‖ (which could also be spelt higra/hijra) used by Said is the Arabic word that
means migration. Tayeb Saleh used the same term when writing his Arabic novel, Mawsim AlHijra Ela al-Shamal.
xxii
See Michel Butor‘s article, ―Travel and Writing,‖ published in a book on travel theory by
Susan Roberson called, Defining Travel: Diverse Visions.USA: University Press of Mississippi,
2001. 69-86.
xxiii
For a detailed analysis of the works of the ―Beirut Decentrists,‖ see miriam cooke‘s Other
Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War.
xxiv
In his book section, ―Deviants in Power,‖ Joseph Massad also draws on different depictions
an representations of male homosexuality in modern and contemporary Arabic literature as part
of the body of postcolonial queer theory. See Massad‘s book, Desiring Arabs.
xxv
The translated quotes taken from The Body is a Traveling Suitcase are my own.
xxvi
I have found other sources that relate the three-month prison sentence issued by the Syrian
government in 1966 against Samman in absentia without further explaining details about the
particular law. However, in the book chapter, ―The Emancipating of Women in Syrian
Literature,‖ Salih Altoma relates the reason Samman was sentenced to prison to a law that
restricted women‘s right to travel abroad alone without a male guardian.
xxvii
According to Chambers, after the diasporic experience takes place, it is impossible to ―go
home again‖ (Chambers qtd. in Seshadri-Crooks 50). Check Seshadri-Crooks‘ article ―At the
Margins of Postcolonial Studies." Also check Chambers‘ book, Migrancy, Culture, Identity
(London: Routledge, 1994).
xxviii
Leila Aboulela uses the binary construction of the North/South instead of the East/West in
the same manner Tayeb Salih uses it in Season of Migration to the North.
xxix
For a full analysis of Leila Aboulela‘s intertextuality of Tayeb Salih‘s novel Season of
Migration to the North in her novel The Translator, check Stephan Guth‘s ―Appropriating or
Secretly Undermining the Secular Literary Heritage? Distant Echoes of Mausim al-Hijra in a
Muslim Writer‘s Novel: Leila Aboulela, The Translator.‖
198
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